7 Tools for DevOps Monitoring in 2023

“DevOps” has been aiding the IT community for more than a decade now. It does so by addressing all the challenges encountered because of the traditional software development model. The term “DevOps” is a blend of two words: development and operations. Its main objectives are continuous improvement, rapid delivery, and cost optimization. However, it can only be achieved by implementing the right tools and practices. So, in this article, we’ve compiled a list of top DevOps monitoring tools you can use to succeed.

Before moving ahead, let’s quickly understand DevOps monitoring.

What’s DevOps Monitoring?

Since it includes everything from planning, development, integration, testing to deployment and operations, DevOps monitoring supervises the entire development process. Moreover, it often also includes a complete real-time view of the status of apps, services, and infrastructure in the production environment. Some of the ideal feature in DevOps monitoring are:

• Real-time streaming
• Visualization
• Historical replay
• Service monitoring

DevOps monitoring helps teams to quickly and automatically respond if there is any degradation in the customer experience. In addition, it plays a vital role in detecting problems, which can be handled manually or automatically with better software instrumentation.

Top 7 DevOps Monitoring Tools

1. Librato

Librato enables users to track and understand the metrics in real time. This DevOps monitoring tool offers features required to monitor a solution, including visualization, analysis, and alerts on all metrics. It also aggregates and transforms real-time data. Some key features of Librato are:

• Simple & easy to use UI
• Installation is not required.
• It offers services, such as sending push notifications on completing activity processing on different metrics.

2. Prometheus

A huge community-driven open-source DevOps monitoring tool, Prometheus is based on white box monitoring. Following are some of the features provided by this monitoring tool:

• Based on the Go programming language, Prometheus is considered as a great tool for future advancement.
• It provides Web API for custom development.
• It collects time-series data and enables users easy connection with PagerDuty.
• It helps in the field of business intelligence by collecting information.
• It has zero dependencies.

3. Kibana

The next useful DevOps monitoring tool is Kibana, which is a browser-based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. This is a free data visualization and exploration tool, which is used for log & time-series analytics, application monitoring, and operational intelligence use cases.

It comes with some useful features, such as visualizing ElasticSearch data, navigating the Elastic Stack. Kibana has some easy-to-use features are line graphs, pie charts, histograms, heat maps, and built-in geospatial support. The most common use cases of Kibana tool are: search, view, and interaction with internally stored data in the ElasticSearch.

Check out some of the benefits of Kibana:

• With this tool, you can get advanced features, such as data analysis and visualization by using charts, maps, and tables. It allows users to visualize log files, display the data and real-time stats in graphical form.
• It comes with a quick and easy setup procedure.
• Last but not least, Kibana offers various useful functions, such as auto-highlighting for search fields to identify issues in log files.

4. Splunk

With over 13,000 active users and 200+ integrations, Splunk is a sophisticated platform for analyzing machine data. It is mainly used for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data using a web-based interface. It compiles data into a central index, enabling users to find the required information quickly. Splunk comes with a few powerful features:

• It is pretty simple to deploy in a production environment.
• It allows transferring data from many servers to the main Splunk engine for analysis.
• It lets users examine data from networks, applications, servers, and other data sources.
• It provides accurate results to the decimal point. However, organizations can take further steps for improvement and take action if required.

5. Nagios

One of the widely-used open-source DevOps monitoring tools, Nagios, is used for continuous monitoring. It assists users in monitoring systems, apps, servers, and business processes. Moreover, if there is something wrong, it notifies users.

It is a simple web interface and free download tool, which supports over 5,000 server monitoring integrations. Its open-source version is Nagios Core. It also comes with the paid version, which is Nagios XI. It monitors infrastructure, apps, networking, services, log files, and operating systems.

Nagios comes with an array of excellent features:

• It enables users to create customized plug-ins to meet their requirements.
• Its documentation is comprehensive and can be used for any specific reference.
• It allows setting up services to ping devices in a company.
• It can do rapid tests. This DevOps monitoring tool is easy to configure from both the client and server sides.

6. Sensu

One of the top DevOps monitoring tools, Sensu is used for monitoring infrastructure and application solutions. It isn’t a SaaS (Software-as-a-service), but users can monitor their systems the way they want. It can be easily integrated with several modern DevOps stacks, such as Slack (a communication & collaboration tool), IRC or HipChat, which your organization may already be using.

Below are some features, which help you to know more about the Sensu monitoring tool:

• It enables users to measure and monitor the health of applications and business KPIs.
• It merges dynamic, static, and temporary infrastructure to solve challenges in the modern infrastructure platforms.
• It is ideal for streamlining operations and provides excellent commercial support.
• It can dynamically register and deregister clients.

7. PagerDuty

Last but not least is PagerDuty. This tool is designed to work closely with operations staff in order to monitor the app’s dependability and performance. It also helps in addressing faults as soon as possible. Let’s quickly check out some of its features:

• It comes with a user-friendly alerting API, which made it quite popular among its users.
• An operations performance platform, PagerDuty embraces excellent and easy-to-use incident response and alerting systems.
• It has a powerful graphical user interface (GUI) for scheduling and policies.

Conclusion

If you are planning to embrace DevOps in your organization, it is essential to ensure that all the right tools and practices must be followed. Therefore, it helps accelerate delivery changes into production while maintaining quality.

You can comment below if you want to share your thoughts on DevOps monitoring and its tools.