Datadog – DevopsCurry

Periodic Table of DevOps Tools (Part-1)

Shiwani Sharma — Wed, 01 May 2024 09:12:22 +0000

Periodic Table of DevOps Tools

What is the DevOps Periodic Table?

It’s a framework where various DevOps tools are categorized and arranged in groups and categories based on their characteristics or roles within the DevOps methodology.

The main aim of the DevOps periodic table is to provide a visual representation that helps the DevOps teams understand the interconnected nature of DevOps practices.

In other words, it’s a grouping of DevOps tools arranged according to their abilities and costs in various categories. Some of the important and well-known DevOps tools include Jenkins, Docker, Git, Kubernetes, Puppet, Ansible, Gradle,Docker,Github etc to name a few.

The DevOps periodic table showcases the DevOps tools list across various categories ordered by their functionality and also the pricing model (Open Source, Free, Freemium, Paid, Enterprise).

Every single element in the Periodic table shows a general aspect of DevOps as like Automation, Collaboration,Continuous Integration, Monitoring, Security etc. These all elements of periodic table are merge and interact with each other to build an overall approach to DevOps (Development & IT Operational )

IMAGE CREDIT: https://www.edureka.co/blog/devops-periodic-table/

In the above image of the DevOps Periodic table, you can see that all the elements or DevOps tools are well arranged and categorized. Some of the tools here are very popular in the market, while others are less popular, but all tools have their own features that are beneficial for users.

It provides the visuals to the users that support the entire team as well the individuals to get to know the various components of DevOps and how these particle element relate to each other and this will also help to improve their practices and processes.

Classification of tools based on the DevOps Periodic table

The periodic table combines different DevOps tools from A to Z, categorizes them, and visualizes several tools. Let us try to understand the outline of different categories.

A

AIOps Tools

Loglizer
ScienceLogic
Ignio AIOps
IBM Turbonomic
Moogsoft

C

Continuous Integration (CI) Tools

These CI tools are crucial DevOps tools used for automation, testing, building, and integration. Selecting reliable integration techniques is essential to quickly identify mistakes. Some of the continuous integration tools include:

Circle CI
Jenkins
Teamcity
Bamboo
GitLab CI/CD
Travis CI

Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD) Tools

These tools automate application deployment and delivery pipelines. These type of tools are used to automate and streamline the process of delivering software updates and change to production environment. Some of the important CD tools are:

Spinnaker
ArgoCD
Jenkins X
Harness
Drone

Configuration Management Tools

Configuration management tools play a vital role in the DevOps lifecycle, automating and managing configuration and infrastructure changes. These tools help users regulate all changes in a simple and comfortable manner. Some important configuration management tools include:

Ansible
Puppet
Chef
SaltStack
Terraform

Containerization & Orchestration

Containerization tools deploy, manage, and package applications using containers. Containerization and Orchestration tools have revolutionized the way teams build & manage the applications. They allow more flexibility, reliability & scalability just by reducing the problems arises with the traditional deployment methods. Some important containerization tools are:

Docker
Kubernetes
Rocket
Codefresh
Helm
Mesos
Rancher
GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine)
Docker Enterprise

Collaboration & Communication

These tools facilitate team collaboration, project management, and communication. They are also beneficial for individual users. Some collaboration and communication tools are:

Slack
Microsoft Teams
JIRA
Confluence

Cloud and Infrastructure Platform

These tools handle cloud resources and infrastructure. These tools permit the organization to manage, provision & scale their application and infrastructure efficiently & the consider tools like:

AWS (Amazon Web Services)
GCP (Google Cloud Platform)
Microsoft Azure

D

Deployment Tools

Capistrano
Juju
GoCD
Octopus Deploy
IBM UrbanCode Deploy
AWS CodeDeploy
DeployBot
Shippable

Database Automation Tools

DbVisualizer
pganalyze
Toad Edge
Kosli
Pachyderm
Liquibase

I

Infrastructure as Code (IAC)

These tools manage infrastructure using code. These tools in DevOps empower organization to manage infrastructure efficiently, increase the agility & automate provisioning of their operations while handing errors and improve the collaboration among development and operations teams. These IAC tools choice is often depends on the specific cloud provider or technology utilized by the organization. Some IAC tools include:

CloudFormation
Terraform
Pulumi
Ansible

L

Logging DevOps Tools

Papertrail
Scalyr
Fluentd
Sentry
Logstash
Loggly
Graylog

M

Monitoring Tools

Monitoring tools continuously track applications in the production phase, ensuring their performance and functionality. These tools are very important components for DevOps practices and provide the real time visibility into the performance, availability, & health of application and infrastructure. These tools helps the DevOps team to identify , performance and optimize system and guaranteed the experience of users. Some monitoring tools are:

Nagios
Datadog
New Relic
Grafana
Prometheus

O

Observability Tools

Datadog
Dynatrace
New Relic
Sentry
Signoz
Sumo Logic
Splunk

S

Source Code Management

The first stage of the DevOps lifecycle is source code, which provides the tools to generate and manage code. Here, tools are categorized for collaboration and performance control on source code. These categorized tools provide insights into which changes were made for improvement. Some of the important tools for source code management are as follows:

Github
Gitlab
Artfactory
Bitbucket
Compuware ISPW
Perforce Helixcore

Security and Compliance Tools

These tools ensure security and compliance throughout the DevOps lifecycle. These tool plays an important role in ensuring, privacy & regulatory compliance of systems, data and applications within an organization. Some of the tools include:

Twistlock
SonarQube
Anchore
Aqua Security

Conclusion

When someone starts learning DevOps tools and technologies, they get overwhelmed and also confused with the numerous tools that accomplished similar tasks, or nearly the same task without a clear opinion on the best toolchain and the workflow. Each one is Free to opt for and select his favourite tool from the bouquet and also market it as the best in the category.

The DevOps periodic table is a small attempt to lessen this chaos and confusion by grouping different Devops tools across various categories in an ordered alphabetic list , from A to Z.

To learn more about DevOps periodic table in detail, do connect with us and stay tuned for our upcoming blog.

The post Periodic Table of DevOps Tools (Part-1) appeared first on DevopsCurry.

Network Monitoring Tools to look in 2024

Shiwani Sharma — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 07:11:25 +0000

What is Network Monitoring?

Network monitoring is the process of constantly notice and examine the execution of computer network. It observes and corrects the performance issues that estimate the network regularly. All the information that a network supervisor wants to check whether the network is working or not in a given period is a network monitoring work to provide the information. As the name suggest from network monitoring, that means tracking several networks parameters as likes packet loss, bandwidth utilization and device status to make sure security and optimal operation.

Definition as per Wikipedia: Network monitoring is the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing components and that notifies the network administrator (via email, SMS or other alarms) in case of outages or other trouble. Network monitoring is part of network management.

Network monitoring play an important role in maintaining the security, reliability and stability of computer networks.

Why is Network Monitoring so important?

To know the importance of Network Monitoring go through to the several points:

Network monitoring is important because it helps you to solve the exact problem on the network.
It focuses on the network traffic, server and whatever as well whenever things go wrong it will inform the network administrators.
It collects the data from the different sources (network) and it supports or handles and regulates the network.
It is also used in different factors like email, application, server etc.
It saves your time as well as your pocket.

8 Best Network Monitoring Tools in 2021

1. Datadog

Datadog was established in 2010 to aid Gin, Django, Spring; these are the famous web frameworks. You can use it for free but it has a paid version also which charges $5 per host per month. This appeal provides you with the concept of network traffic and the search with tags. It detects errors by using machine learning and monitoring cloud instances, hybrid architectures, Monitor containers and on-premises.

In a similar position, users can get overall perception into traces, log, network traffic by combining metric-based (Network Device Monitoring) with flow-based Network Performance Monitoring. It is good for all organizations whether it is small, medium or large.

2. ntopng

ntopng is an open-source tool that is easy and quick and with the network, it’s building an HTML mess and edict as a web server. It controls the traffic on the network for a certain point. This tool is free, a small scale industry can utilize this tool. This is one of the strongest tool that provide insight visibility into the behavior and traffic of network. It also support monitoring protocols as likes IPFIX, NetFlow and sFlow etc that also allow you to collect traffic data from switches, routers and other network devices.

3. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

It handles the characteristics of NetPath which solves the problem on the network. It can easily observe and then solve the trouble in the performance of the network. It also regulates the uptime of routers, switches, feedback time etc. It has a paid version but you can use it for free on a trial period of 30 days.

4. Logic Monitor

This is one of the best monitoring tools for window servers as well as SaaS-based monitoring solutions. This tool has the paid version and it is easy to regulate . It provide a strong and user-friendly platform for handing and monitoring IT infrastructure, that support the organization to optimize the performance and also verify the availability and improve operational efficiency. Logic Monitor tool constructed in a way to support numerous devices and monitoring metrics across hybrid, on-premises and cloud environment for your organizations.

5. PRTG Network Monitor

It is beneficial for the customer and it is easy to use for a developer for the improvement of the network. This is the best for all organizations whether it is small, big or large. You can use it for free as well. It has a paid version at $130. One of the main features of PRTG is to collect the data, and handle the IP address.

Key Features of PRTG

Some of the features of PRTG are as follow:

Collect the data
Handling the IP address
Having Internet User
Dashboard
Services Level Agreement (SLA)
Analysis of Network
Easy to use and easy to handle
It is acceptable for all organization either it is small, big large.

6. Observium

It supports several devices and networks such are Dell, HP, Cisco etc. It can handily solve the problem simply in the way of network performance as well it’s easy to put any tools on Observium. You can set up this tool effortlessly, it is easy to use and can infer quickly. It has a paid version but you can use it on a free trial.

7. Monitorix

It provides information related to the network and has limitations because it’s a free tool. It does not have more features of network monitoring.

8. LibreNMS

You can use this tool on your Mobile, it’s an Mobile friendly tool as it aids Cisco, Foundry, Linux and Juniper there are the operating system. One of the best features of this tool is you don’t have a big team of people for regulating.

Conclusion: As we conclude this journey, it’s clear that the right network monitoring tool is not just a necessity but a strategic asset. From real-time performance metrics to in-depth analysis of network traffic, these tools provide a lens into the heartbeat of your infrastructure.

The diversity of available tools caters to the needs of organizations large and small, across various industries. Whether you’re safeguarding against downtime, optimizing resource utilization, or ensuring compliance, network monitoring tools offer a comprehensive suite of features to meet your objectives.

The post Network Monitoring Tools to look in 2024 appeared first on DevopsCurry.

Best popular Container Monitoring Tools to explore in 2024

Namrata Joshi — Sun, 21 Feb 2021 13:40:12 +0000

What is Container Monitoring? Popular Container Monitoring Tools

The use of container technology is at its peak. The benefits of containers for cloud-based microservices are infinite. Container Monitoring is the process of tracing the performance of applications that are built on a microservices architecture. Containers are complex and more challenging to keep an eye on compared to traditional applications running on virtual servers.

Monitoring the performance of containerized applications to ensure application continuity is crucial. Monitoring becomes more effective through analyzing metrics, obtainer from any sources like host and demons logs, and monitoring agents installed on each node.

Container monitoring tools track container performance, collects event data, and measures the effects of container-sharing resources. Now Monitoring practices can be either proactive, reactive or adaptive. While Proactive monitoring sets protocols to prevent container failure, in Reactive monitoring we alert users by raising events when the containers fail. Adaptive monitoring continually assesses container performance and impacts from new components.

Importance of Monitoring Docker Containers

Like any other technologies, Containers are subject to performance degradation. The health of containerized applications directly impacts the health and business efficiency of a business. Monitoring application performance ensures that both the containerized applications and the infrastructure are always at optimum levels.

Monitoring Docker Containers helps in:

Detect and solve issues at an early stage.
Proactively avoids the risks at the production level.
Implement changes safely as the whole environment is monitored.
Optimize resources allocation.

What Resources to monitor

Host based Metrics

Host CPU
Host Memory
Host Disk Space
Total Number of Running Containers

Container-based metrics

Container CPU – Throttled CPU Time
Container Memory Usage
Container Memory – Fail Counters
Container Swap
Container Disk I/O

You can also refer to our posts on Application Monitoring and Monitoring best practices:

DevOps Tools: What is APM and Best APM Tools in 2021 !

Best Monitoring and Alerting Practices to follow in 2021

Image Credits: https://logz.io/blog/docker-monitoring-dockercon-2016/

Popular Container Monitoring Tools for Docker in 2021

When it comes to monitoring any containerized app, you have to choose the monitoring tools that fit your specific requirements. Here we have included the top ten container monitoring tools for Docker. Take a look at each tool to see what they offer and what suits your needs best.

AppOptics Docker Monitoring with APM
AppOptics is a SaaS-based APM and infrastructure tool for hybrid and cloud-native IT environments. It offers a robust monitoring solution for Docker containers. AppOptics have a pre-configured docker monitoring dashboard. It visualizes per-container CPU, memory, and network metrics.
Some of the key features of AppOptics are auto-instrumented application service topology map, pinpoint the root cause of performance issues, performance monitoring, full-stack visibility, modern infrastructure monitoring, and AWS monitoring.
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor
The most prominent feature of SolarWinds is its ability to detect issues directly from the container layer. This feature gives it an edge over other traditional server monitors.
SolarWinds offer tracking for key performance metrics like CPU, memory, and uptime of individual Docker containers via a simple dashboard. Other important features of SolarWinds are instant alert regarding depleted resources, the ability to detect issues directly from the container layer, and the ability to isolate individual containers and monitor them concerning their neighboring nodes.
Prometheus
Its an open-source Docker monitoring tool and is also one of the three solutions recommended by Docker. Prometheus offers a simple docker dashboard that visualizes the workloads of targeted Docker instances. It creates a separate volume to store recorded metrics.
Prometheus is available as an image easily installed on Docker containers. There are some advanced configurations for production environments. Hence, it is one of the easiest to configure for larger setups.
The Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) can be used to query metrics and statistics through the dashboard in a tabular or graphical form. One disadvantage of Prometheus is that it’s impossible to monitor containerized apps via the Docker target. Docker suggests other tools for this purpose.
Docker API
Docker API provides an API for interacting with the Docker daemon, also known as the Docker Engine API. it is the official HTTP Web Service API for interacting with Docker. This is used to connect any external Docker monitoring tool via the secure API endpoints to gather metrics and store or visualize them.
Docker API is ideal for organizations that have their applications for monitoring containers from multiple service providers.
ManageEngine Applications Manager
It is an application management solution that helps businesses to monitor their data centers, applications, databases, and systems. It is possible to monitor all the components in a single, integrated platform, which can scale upto 50,000 apps.ManageEngine specializes in tracking both container environments as well as the applications encapsulated within them. ManageEngine allows all containers within each host to reduce bottlenecks in performance and availability. Application Manager allows to set up pre-configured rules related to container status and performance metrics.
cAdvisor
cAdvisor or container advisor analyzes and exposes resource usage and performance data from running containers. cAdvisor is from Google and is open-source. It is a running daemon that collects, aggregates, and exports resource usage and performance data of targeted containers.cAdvisor focuses on resource isolation parameters, historical resource usage, and histograms of historical data. Builds of cAdvisor are available as images that you can install on Docker hosts. It offers a web UI as well as a REST API to cater to both users that are looking to monitor their Docker containers directly as well as integrate metrics to an external app via web service endpoints.
SolarWinds Librato
Librato is a SolarWinds company that offers a hosted monitoring platform that companies use to collect, visualize, and store large amounts of streaming data. The goal is to manage the health of their applications.
Librato brings all the benefits of SolarWinds with more customized features. It can manage a wide range of languages and frameworks through RPC calls, queues, and other resources.
Dynatrace
Dynatrace application monitoring provides all performance metrics in real-time and detects and diagnoses problems automatically. It gives an out-of-the-box solution for monitoring containerized apps without installing any image or modifying run commands.
Dynatrace enables extensive tracking and monitoring through log monitoring even when details like docker name, ID, host details are not available. It does not require extensive storage space just like many other monitoring tools.
Datadog
Datadog gives you the ability to create monitors the actively check metrics, integration availability, network endpoints, and more. Datadog collects data related to services, applications, and platforms via detailed log data. This data is automatically visualized to highlight unusual behavior.Datadog can monitor the data by the platform natively. Using this feature, it is possible to monitor both holistically and to drill down to container level. All data is available via an interactive dashboard that shows real-time data.
Sysdig
Sysdig is an open-source, cross-platform system monitoring and troubleshooting tool. It is powerful and flexible. One of the most significant advantages of Sysdig is that it provides monitoring for containers, cloud services, and Kubernetes.

It is extremely important to choose Docker monitoring tools that are robust and allow them to be deployed quickly across thousands of nodes. Drop a comment below if you have any suggestions regarding the best Docker Container Monitoring Tools.

The post Best popular Container Monitoring Tools to explore in 2024 appeared first on DevopsCurry.

Best Monitoring and Alerting Practices to follow in 2021

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 17:55:29 +0000

DevOps Monitoring and Alerting Best Practices in 2021

DevOps’ approach has been widely adopted by many businesses to enhance the continuous delivery and integration process. But the main feature is to automate the process within the DevOps pipeline. Automation has changed the overall effectiveness of the business. But the challenge occurs while maintaining and monitoring these automated pipelines. You must keep an eye on what is going on within the business as the network grows. As the business grows, having full visibility of the system is getting complicated, especially when you have fewer resources at your disposal. A proper alerting system will send alerts of any unexpected behavior of the system or an application.

Irrespective of your business’s size, you should consider many aspects of monitoring like what should be monitored, what type of tools should be used, and how you should plan the strategy, to begin with monitoring. You can include various automated monitoring tools that will help you to find potential issues. With software development, the monitoring and alerting process have also evolved. As the DevOps approach is gaining success, you can monitor each DevOps phase from integration, provisioning, and even deployment.

DevOps team can use DevOps strategies to monitor each aspect of the software or the project efficiently and effectively. The below article will discuss the monitoring and alerting strategies that should be implemented for a smooth delivery process.

Be specific- what to monitor?

To ensure better system performance, there are many things that you can monitor. But you have to specify and determine what things within the system you want to watch and to what extent. Some of the categories that need monitoring-

Server health checks

You should check the server’s health to ensure the system performance and uptime concerning the available resources. DevOps team should configure the resources properly to identify the critical endpoints within the application. Also, make sure that your server approves the implemented configurations to work seamlessly.

Application log output

Among all other aspects of DevOps, logging an application’s output is often ignored. You must have a centralized logging system in place to check for errors. Make sure that you place proper tools and strategies to pinpoint and alert the errors in real-time to avoid vulnerabilities. These logs are essential for IT teams and system administrators to work on expected errors to find the root cause and resolve them in time.

Development milestones

After implementing the DevOps approach, we must keep track of how well the strategy works and gain your workflow insights. It helps in checking how well your teams are collaborating to achieve success. You should track the sprint durations, error identification rate, resolve rate, and other features to enhance performance. Maintaining proper checks will help you meet the tasks’ deadlines and how well the DevOps approach is implemented. You can find which job need automation and will save your time.

User activity

There are various types of users, and some of their unusual activity may hinder your software. Every user’s accounts are protected and have role-based access to different applications. You must track what is being accessed by which user to ensure safety.

You can also read our posts on APM and Open Source Monitoring tools:

Monitoring Tools functionalities

Among various monitoring tools, you should consider using those efficient tools to gather performance time-series data from multiple sources, track applications for alerting and collect data in databases. Various tools have a different set of functionalities, but you should choose the right one to solve your purpose of implementing a proper monitoring strategy in place. Some of the functionalities that you might consider are discussed below.

1. Dashboards: The implemented monitoring tool should have an interactive user dashboard to get real-time insights into your applications. It should be more comfortable for every user to work on the tool to analyze what is going on within the system.

2. Diagnosis: The tool should help you to find the critical endpoints for vulnerabilities within the system. It allows you to ensure that all your applications are working as expected.

3. Data collector: It should provide you with open-source agents that support programming language.

4. Data retention: It helps you to gather real-time time-series performance of the data and log data.

5. Notifications: You should consider monitoring tools are well-incorporated with the notification system that alerts you about the tasks and latest updates.

6. Reports: The monitoring tool should allow you to report all the tasks, activities, and insights to look for performance hotspots and planning.

How to optimize your Monitoring and Alerting strategy

Once you adopt a monitoring strategy and required tools, you must know how to optimize your strategy efficiently. As the monitoring process has a standard procedure and manually will consume time manually and repeat the process again and again. It is a better option that we automate the monitoring tasks for regular updates.

We can also set alerts on the notification to generate reports and notifications to be sent across the system. This will optimize the monitoring process by implementing proper alerts on each task to check the system’s performance and speed. It will help you to get a better system insight without intervening in the system.

1. Set your monitoring and alerting priority

First, you need to understand the criticality of the applications, different services, and the tasks involved within your system. After that, you can decide what task is more critical and what notifications you should get in the first place. Suppose you are running deployments, and in the meantime, your server and code get compromised at the same time. You need to prioritize the alerting system to send you a notification so the issue will get resolved in time.

Setting the priority will also help the IT team to work on the priority issue on an urgent basis to support the end-users and the business. It will allow IT to respond quickly to problems, provide better customer service, and save time searching for the potential area of error.

2.Monitor the application stack

The monitoring tool that you will choose should monitor the complete stack with a faster troubleshooting process. The tool should cover the below feature set in the application.

Infrastructure monitoring It should include monitoring your availability of resources like- CPU usage, disk usage, uptime, response time, database, storage capacity, performance, security, network switches, server load, etc.

Performance monitoring It should include monitoring your SLAs, browser speed, end-user transactions, throughput, error rate, page loads, etc.

Network monitoring It should include monitoring your network packet flow, bandwidth, latency, network topology, etc.

Commonly used Monitoring and Alerting Tools

Image Credit: https://pt.slideshare.net/grobie/efficient-monitoring-and-alerting/18

Monitoring Tools

Infrastructure Monitoring Tools: Solarwinds AppOptics, Solarwinds ipMonitor,ManageEngine OpManager, Zabbix,Paessler PRTG
Application Monitoring Tools: New Relic APM,AppDynamics, Stackify Retrace, Dynatrace (Compuware APM),TraceView (SolarWinds),Application Insights (Microsoft)
Network Monitoring Tools: WLC monitoring, Datadog, Site24x7, Nagios,ntop, Obkio,Gif Languard, WhatsUp Gols (WUG)

Alerting Tools

PagerDuty, VictorOps,OpsGenie,AlertOps,Cabot,NgDesk, Bosun, StatsAgg

The post Best Monitoring and Alerting Practices to follow in 2021 appeared first on DevopsCurry.