Top 4 DevOps Tools for Monitoring

Posted by Emily Williamson on December 4th, 2019

Anyone in the technology and software development industry would be familiar with the buzzword ‘DevOps’. With the shifting focus of the industry towards agile methods of software development, many software and mobile app development services providers have adopted a DevOps culture. Making this shift and practicing DevOps requires a significant change in the culture, practices, and the entire system. It also requires a certain toolset that can help the company practice DevOps smoothly and these DevOps tools are what we are going to discuss in this article. 

This article compares and analyses the top 4 DevOps tools out there: Sensu, Prometheus, Nagios, and Sysdig. If you are a beginner who is unfamiliar with the concept of DevOps tools, don’t worry! We have you covered. For your ease, let’s understand the concept of DevOps before we dive into our discussion about the tools and their pros and cons. 

So what is DevOps? Let’s find out!

What is DevOps?

The process of software development consists of multiple steps or phases that are performed by a team of developers and software engineers. This development process is called the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). There are different methods of performing the SDLC and DevOps is one of the many SDLC methodologies.

DevOps methodology aims to make the development process agile and quick by ensuring communication and collaboration between different teams, especially the team of developers and operations professionals. 

Traditionally, the Dev and Ops aspect of software development were used to be considered as separate and different functions. Devs or developers were considered those who create the software and Ops or operators were considered those who would deal with other aspects after development, such as deployment. 

The DevOps approach breaks free from this traditional view and emphasizes collaboration between the developers and operators so they work together as a team at every step of the development process.

Now that you understand what DevOps is, let’s answer another important question. What are monitoring tools and why are they needed for DevOps?

What is a monitoring tool?

As discussed above, the DevOps approach emphasizes the efficiency and quality of software products above everything else. Therefore, one of the most important tools for DevOps is monitoring tools. 

Monitoring Tools are platforms, software or systems that let the developers and operators monitor the performance and infrastructure of their software products so they can detect any potential problems that can affect their performance and productivity. Continuous monitoring is key for DevOps so that problems are identified and addressed quickly without disturbing the development lifecycle.

Now that you understand what a monitoring tool is, let’s discuss the top 4 DevOps monitoring tools.  

List of top DevOps tools for monitoring:

  • Sensu

Sensu is an open-source multi-cloud monitoring solution that was launched in 2017. It is a comprehensive tool for businesses to use to have complete visibility over their systems. Once you integrate it into your organization’s infrastructure you can monitor your servers, services, containers, applications, functions, and other connected devices.

Sensu’s monitoring event pipeline allows you to automate your workflows and have full control over your alerts. You can also collect and store metrics alongside checking results. 

  • Nagios

Nagios is another top contender for the best DevOps monitoring tools. It is a simple tool that allows you to monitor all the important components like operating systems, applications, network protocols, and more. With Nagios, you get complete visibility over your network and infrastructure so you can identify and resolve problems and the business processes remain unaffected and perform smoothly, keeping the customers and end-users satisfied. 

Nagios also allows you to identify necessary infrastructure upgrades so you can upgrade in a timely manner to avoid outages and failures.

Currently, Nagios offers 4 types of monitoring tools which include:

  • Nagios XI: A robust IT infrastructure monitoring tool. It is a central solution to monitor all important infrastructure components including network, operating systems, applications, and services.  

  • Nagios Log Server: It is a monitoring and analysis software for centralized log management. 

     

  • Nagios Network Analyzer: A network monitoring tool and bandwidth utilization software to analyze the health, traffic sources of a network. 

  • Nagios Fusion: A complete monitoring tool for a centralized view of your IT infrastructure.

  • Prometheus

Prometheus is a community-driven open source monitoring tool by SoundCloud. What sets it apart from other monitoring tools is its ability to pull metrics from services and systems. These real-time metrics are recorded in a time-series database and based on this data it provides insight on the infrastructure. It can diagnose problems in the data quickly and triggers alert in real-time.

Prometheus is easy to use and easy to integrate into your environment. Its rich data model and flexible query language make it a complete monitoring solution. Another great feature of Prometheus is that its server is standalone, which means users can always view statistics of a system even during outages.

  • Sysdig

Sysdig is also a robust cross-platform and open-source monitoring and troubleshooting tool. It is compatible with Mac OSX, Linux and Windows and offers a full range of features to monitor system activity. These features include real-time process and network bandwidth monitoring, network connections and traffic monitoring, support for container technologies, advanced log analysis, and more. 

With Sysdig you can have end-to-end visibility and security over your architecture and environment. It delivers deep insights to help you visualize your infrastructure and services and identify problem areas and bottlenecks. With Sysdig you are instantly notified about the problems so that you can troubleshoot and manage the performance, risk, and health of your microservices. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, there are a number of monitoring tools and solutions available out there but the 4 we have highlighted are the top contenders in our opinion. These tools are packed with features to give you complete visibility over your infrastructure and environment while making the monitoring process easy for you. For DevOps, continuous monitoring is essential, and with tools like these, you can easily detect problems with your systems early on, get insights based on data, reduce the chances of outages and failure, and know the need for upgrades.  

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Emily Williamson

About the Author

Emily Williamson
Joined: October 7th, 2019
Articles Posted: 1