DevOps Main Monitoring Tools, Extensively Discussed: Effects and Productivity

What is DevOps? How monitoring tools in DevOps improve Productivity?

13:04 15 October 2020

Nevertheless, there are top monitoring tools in DevOps that can be proactive in business productivity and effects.

 

Top 10 Main Monitoring Tools in DevOps

 

DevOps methodology is transforming the process and culture of an organization to improve its efficiency and speed. With a constantly increasing demand for software products worldwide, developers are faced with daily pressure to produce and release effectively functioning applications and other software products and services.

 

This organizational transformation, however, comes with its demands. To observe and monitor progress, there needs to be measurement abilities within the DevOps cycle. Such needs are satisfied by several tools that enable an automated measurement and visibility of the entire system.

 

Monitoring tools are enabling companies to utilize the DevOps methodology efficiently and, in turn, optimizing their visibility, productivity, higher results, and improving cross-functional collaboration. However, choosing the right tool for your company’s culture can not be so easy. Organizations such as AIpacked.io are providing DevOps solutions to help monitor your system. This article discusses what DevOps stands for and how monitoring it improves productivity. Further, it shall delve into the main monitoring tools in DevOps.

 

What is DevOps?

 

Packed within a trying loop of delivery and feed, developers and managers have to build, test, release, monitor the feedback, and plan on it. To achieve this effectively, companies have to put in place a combination of tools, practices, and philosophies that are meant to improve the company’s capability of delivering services and applications focusing on the speed and reliability of creation and evolution of the products and services.

 

Once separated teams, the developers and operations teams have been brought together by the DevOps methodology to help them create a culture that promotes the DevOps model's and functionality. While the developers have their speed of production pumped up by the methodology, the operations team has been involved in every stage of the loop to ensure a continuous movement and a maintained velocity.

 

As a result of this methodology, companies can integrate agility, a feature highly possessed and applied by the developers and steady movement, which is maintained by the operations. For instance, a DevOps engineer will collaborate with IT developers to facilitate better coordination among operations, testing, and development functions by streamlining the integration and deployment process through automation.

 

Proactive monitoring is employed in DevOps lifecycles. In its way, this monitoring is meant to improve the application’s quality before issues begin to arise. This monitoring has further reduced the margin of error by monitoring not only the DevOps chain but also its tools. Crumbed up together, all these procedures contribute to the improvement of productivity.

How Does Monitoring Improve Productivity?

 

Monitoring tools allow you to monitor the company’s DevOps infrastructure and application performance. This can be done in the cloud or even on the premises. Containerized environments are also possible to monitor. Monitoring provides visibility into the whole system. Whatever you intend to monitor, having the appropriate tools of monitoring makes it possible.

 

It is already evident that with this level of visibility into the organization’s DevOps system, the performance of the system is bound to improve, which in turn increases the level of productivity. However, it is important to break down this monitoring significance to understand exactly how the level of productivity improves with efficient monitoring. To decipher this, we will need to understand how monitoring affects or rather supports the DevOps environment and workflow. That way, we can easily link the success of the DevOps methodology to the improvement in production. Monitoring enables teams to easily collaborate, automate, configure, and share knowledge within the organization. These four traits allow the embracing of DevOps to an optimum level. By doing so, agility for the system is improved as the teams break down departmental walls to increase the frequency and effectiveness of production. 

Collaborate

 

Early in the life cycle, monitoring improves the collaboration of teams, which improves availability and optimizes performance. To bring everyone on the same page, teams streamline standardization using monitors created by reused artifacts from test and design phases.

 

Automate 

 

Proactive monitoring is done automatically. The less the manual the better, that way your applications run as required and the monitoring tools are in proper function. 

 

Configure

 

An efficient monitoring tool will offer configuration measures for alert set up and creating monitoring so that you can receive the required data when you most need it. A monitoring tool should ensure your processes are well-tailored and that your mean time to repair is effective.

 

Share

 

Transfer of information is key to collaboration. Monitoring avails a shared dataset available to all teams. This improves alignment, a key factor in the life and success of DevOps.

 

10 Key DevOps Monitoring Tools

 

An illustration of top DevOps tools.

 

As noted before, a proper monitoring platform allows the complete monitoring of the performance of the applications and the DevOps infrastructure. A useful monitoring tool improves the performance of the system and reduces if not eliminates downtime. As a result, an increase in productivity is eventually recorded. The following tools are the major ones used in DevOps today.

 

Sensu

 

This monitoring tool checks the health of the system by monitoring applications, services, containers, services, and all devices connected to this system. It is scalable and flexible.

 

Prometheus

 

It has a built-in database and it applies the pull method to collect and contribute information to this database.

 

Nagios

 

This tool is a pioneer in monitoring practices. It is one of the first of its kind in this generation of operators.

 

Gradle

 

This tool helps software developers build multi-language applications. It is a tool for build automation. It controls the process of development in compilation, packaging, testing, deploying, and publishing.

 

Git

 

This is a control system that is designed to deal with everything with efficiency and speed for both large and small projects. It is free, open-source, and easy to master. It functions at a very high speed and leaves a tiny footprint.

 

Jenkins

 

Also, an open-source CD/CI server, Jenkins enables automation of several DevOps pipeline stages. This tool offers more than 1000 plugins which means it can integrate with almost all DevOps tools.

 

Bamboo

 

For continuous integration, deployment, and delivery, Bamboo is one of the best tool choices. It is Atlassian’s CD/CI server solution with so many similarities with Jenkins. However, it has fewer plugins. This could be attributed to many pre-built functionalities.

 

Docker

 

Launched in 2013, Docker has been leading in the container platform. It has also been referred to as one of the most important DevOps tools in the market today. It has popularised containerization by making distributed development possible and automating application deployment.

 

Kubernetes

 

Also another containerization tool, Kubernetes is an open-source system and it is crucial in automating the deployment of apps, scaling, and managing containerized applications. It functions well if integrated with Docker and several other options. Several Google engineers developed it to manage containers at scale. 

 

Puppet Enterprise

 

Also known as just Puppet, it is a cross-platform configuration management platform. It enables the management of infrastructure as code. This is actually the automation of infrastructure management. As a result, the delivery of software is made fast and secure.

 

Alpacked and DevOps Monitoring Tools

 

As a DevOps Consulting Organization, Alpacked can help your organization break down the silos as you set up the right process and departments that align with your business goals. By extension, the services offered by Alpacked Company also includes monitoring tools in DevOps. As a DevOps service provider, Alpacked will take care of your operations by providing all types of Cloud and DevOps services.

 

Final Verdict 

 

No matter your business journey with DevOps, it is essential to re-evaluate the tools you are using with your business. The re-evaluation process will help you with fine tuning the tools that might affect the productivity of DevOps implementation. You are encouraged to think about DevOps tools in the monitoring ecosystem than the way you value their capabilities. How your organization uses monitoring tools in DevOps define your work values and organizational culture. Monitoring tools can also affect the quality of the services and products you bring to customers (users).