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DevOps Monitoring Tools

Top 5 DevOps Monitoring Tools

Having the right DevOps monitoring tools is important. Not only is it good for picking out bugs and other facets that require improvement, but it helps to better optimize and plan on an application’s continued development. Because DevOps monitoring directly boosts the health of the app and the business, having the right tool for the job matters significantly.

What DevOps Tools Provide

DevOps monitoring tools are built to keep watch over the health and vitals of a system or application.  This includes the expenditure of hardware resources such as the CPU and disk space.  Through continuous monitoring, developers can quickly find problems in their nascent stages and quickly remedy them before they devolve into outages and degradation.

datadog devops

1. DataDog

DataDog is a GO-based agent built on Apache Cassandra, PostgreSQL, and Kafka.  It is compatible with a number of popular cloud service providers and has different integration options available including Ubuntu and Kubernetes.  The dashboards can keep track of multiple metrics on a single screen, have a simple appearance, and are easy to customize.  It also has multi-language support allowing Java, Python, Node, and Ruby.

new relic devops

2. New Relics

New Relics is geared more toward web application development.  It is a Software-as-a-Service that has controls in the form of a browser add-on.  It can support Python, Java, PHP, and Ruby and can be integrated with common cloud service providers.  With a more web application-centric focus, it provides metrics for throughput, transaction response time, Apdex score, and the expenditure of resources on the user’s end.

VictorOps DevOps

3. VictorOps

VictorOps puts greater emphasis on putting out alerts when incidents occur so a team can respond faster.  Its tool sets provide clear options for constructing remediation strategies in quick reaction to errors and have advanced analysis and risk evaluation functionality.  Even if the damage is done, there are forensics functionality for understanding what happened and providing recommendations for preventing recurring issues.  Regardless of company size, users can easily expect efficiency to increase and downtime from waiting for repairs and remediation to decrease.

sentry devops

4. Sentry

Sentry is an extension of Microsoft Azure DevOps but does come with integration options for either the front end or the back end.  However, Sentry performs the best in front-end deployments with applications situated on the cloud or in a Kubernetes cluster.  Applications on the cloud will only have monitoring data flow from the application to the Sentry server.  Additionally, there are options for pre-set functions as a Software-as-a-Service program or with custom adjustments as a self-hosted addon.

Amazon Web Services

5. AWS Offerings

AWS is an incredibly popular platform for building and hosting applications of various scales and functions.  With how complex AWS is, Amazon does provide in-house services for DevOps teams to use.  Along with simplifying DevOps with tools already designed for this cloud environment, there are also opportunities for cost savings depending on the resources used.  Depending on the needs of the DevOps team, there are a number of services available.

  • Amazon Cloudwatch - Cloudwatch is the more general monitoring tool not necessarily dedicated towards DevOps, but consisting of all the typical tools necessary for DevOps monitoring automatically.  Especially considering the following features:
    • Alarms – Alarms can be set up around certain metrics and will trigger when those thresholds are crossed.  Automated reactions can be established to react to the alerts or to ignore as required.
    • Logs and Insights – All active resources are tracked and the related logs can be aggregated and stored while remaining relatively simple.
    • Events – Events are a near real-time stream of changes made to the system.  By writing rules for what specific events to look out for, actions can then be automated to react quickly for course correction.
  • Amazon EventBridge - EventBridge is designed more for bridging and controlling events and workflows between SaaS and other custom applications.  This is more ideal for applications that need to work at scale and have to remain flexible and require coordination between teams.
  • AWS CloudTrail - CloudTrail is a service that logs API interactions and user activity on an environment whether it is completely in the cloud or on a hybrid setup or is situated in a different AWS region.  For DevOps, this would be helpful for diagnosing issues.
  • Amazon DevOps Guru - This is the service more directly tailored to DevOps needs.  Using machine learning, it can detect operational issues and act accordingly before these issues begin impacting customers.

Better Visibility

DevOps teams need to properly diagnose problems in order to make continuous improvements.  These tools are meant to provide improved visibility on what resources need to be considered and how well they are functioning.  Through improved visibility, developers can have an easier time finding problems before they worsen.

Dolan Cleary

Dolan Cleary

I am a recent graduate from the University of Wisconsin - Stout and am now working with AllCode as a web technician. Currently working within the marketing department.

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