DevOps Monitoring Tools

Monitoring tools are the eyes and ears of the DevOps team for getting Full Stack Visibility into IT Services, and choosing the right DevOps monitoring tool can make all the difference for efficient workflows and happier end-users.

Different Types of DevOps Monitoring tools based on what to monitor

The usual monitoring tools for most DevOps teams are classified into four categories (but is not limited to):

• Infrastructure Monitoring
• Network Monitoring (NPM)
• Application performance monitoring (APM)
• Log analysis tool

Let’s dive into each layer and see where they fit in your DevOps monitoring process.

Infrastructure Monitoring

These tools can monitor the entire infrastructure including Bare metal servers, Virtual Machine, Kubernetes cluster. Infrastructure monitoring tools help identify and resolve IT infrastructure problems before they affect critical business processes. They can help you plan for upgrades before outdated systems begin to cause failures. Infrastructure monitoring tools also make sure maintenance outages have a minimal impact on users.

By monitoring the health of the infrastructure, you can get a sense of the health of the applications running on it. However, these tools don’t monitor the application as a complete set of services. In that sense, they take a traditional approach to monitoring that isn’t best suited for today’s cloud based applications.

Example of Infrastructure Monitoring : Nagios, Zabbix

Network Monitoring Or Network Performance Monitoring

Network monitoring is a critical component of the connected organizations, these tools provide a holistic view of how networks (including corporate on-premises, cloud, multi cloud, hybrid and other networks) are performing. Data sources include: Network-device-generated traffic data Raw network packets Network-device-generated health metrics and events NPM tools provide diagnostic workflows and forensic data to identify the root causes of performance degradations in order to maintain infrastructure health and help identify vulnerabilities across a system’s environment. Network monitoring systems are capable of detecting and reporting failures of network connections, Devices (Switches, routers) among others. 

Example of Infrastructure Monitoring : Solar Winds, Manage Engine

Application Performance Monitoring

Application performance monitoring tools, as the name suggests, monitor your application’s performance. They provide visibility into the behavior of your application, detect problems that impact users, and help rapidly resolve those issues. They monitor end-to-end application flow and provide traces that include code level details. APM tools contain deep diagnostics that help you find the exact line of code that may be causing a performance slowdown or failure.

While APM tools help improve performance and prevent latency and downtime, there are many issues that require deeper troubleshooting than APM can provide. These issues require indexing and searching of log files. Unfortunately, APM tools do not analyze log files and are unable to detect security attacks. You need a log analysis tool for this kind of analysis.

Example: New Relic, AppDynamics

Log Analysis

Log analysis tools provide a scalable, reliable way to store and index your log files. They can search through files quickly, create detailed analytics based on the log data, and monitor for security violations and cyber-attacks based on the log file. However, they do not provide end-to-end application performance monitoring and are unable to reveal code level traces

Example: Splunk, Elastic Stack

As you can see each category of these tools are specialized in monitoring specific metrics only, as a Devops personnel If you rely on any one of these tools alone when an incident occurs, you’ll always miss some key piece for the resolution. That's the main challenge for Devops teams.

Solutions like Zapoj IT Event Management are leveraged by organizations to centralize and aggregate all the events and alerts that are generated from all the tools in the IT portfolio, to triage and orchestrate better response to incidents in real-time.