Monitoring – DevopsCurry

Monitoring vs Observability: What’s the difference?

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 02:23:02 +0000

In this article, we are discussing how so similar-sounding terms like monitoring and observability differ of Monitoring vs Observability

How is monitoring different from observability?

Bugs and errors are inevitable even with the most experienced developers and tools on the team. Finding and resolving these bugs is a major part of the development process. But the problem comes when customers find these bugs first. Because then they might give a bad ‘public’ review or worse, switch to a competitor never to return again.

However, this unfortunate situation can be avoided if the developers find these bugs first and fix them before the customers face them. But how?

Here comes monitoring and observability tools that help developers detect and fix errors and anomalies across the system. They may sound similar, but monitoring and observability are quite different based on their functionality and scope of work.

Let’s first understand what is monitoring…

What is monitoring?

Monitoring refers to continuously collecting and analyzing data on performance, availability, and system health in general. It measures specific metrics like CPU usage, uptime/downtime, response time, error rates, etc.

SRE(Site Reliability Engineering) developed by Google is the practice of combining software engineering and operations to automate tasks and ensure system reliability. Dynatrace describes it as “As a discipline, SRE focuses on improving software system reliability across key categories including availability, performance, latency, efficiency, capacity, and incident response.” SRE practices involve monitoring of some the most important metrics known as the 4 golden signals. They are described as follows:

Latency: It is the time taken by a system to respond to a request. For example, the time it takes for a website to load when the user clicks on its link. If the latency is more i.e. the website takes more time to load, it annoys the user who might abandon it. Thus, the lower the latency, the better the user experience.
Traffic: Traffic measures the amount of load a service or system is handling at a time. A higher traffic indicates higher user demand for the service.
Error: The error rate is the rate of unsuccessful or failed requests. It is important to track both the overall error rate and the service-specific error rate. Categorizing errors into critical and non-critical also helps the development team deal with the most disruptive errors first.
Saturation: Saturation tells you about the overall capacity of a service or how close a service is to reaching its limits. It is measured in terms of how much CPU, memory, or network bandwidth the service is utilizing.

Application performance monitoring or APM is another term related to monitoring that focuses on tracking the performance of applications in particular. Some popular monitoring tools include Nagios, Zabbix and Prometheus.

What is observability?

Strongdm defines observability, also known as O11Y, as “the ability to assess an internal system’s state based on the data it produces.”

Unlike monitoring, which barely collects data as fixed metrics, observability involves analyzing current and historical data and helps to diagnose the root cause of errors in the system. That said, although observability has a wider scope than monitoring, it cannot function without it.

The 3 pillars of observability through which it determines system health are – logs, metrics, and traces…

Metrics: Metrics are quantitative (or numerical) measures of data that indicate the system’s health and performance. It is the place where observability overlaps with monitoring. Error rate, CPU utilization, and network throughput are a few examples of metrics.
Logs: SolarWinds defines logs as “…detailed records of events from every piece of software, user action, and network activity.” They include time-stamped and chronological data on all the processes that occur within a service. That said, while metrics raise alerts during a problem, logs tell about what events happened and are happening around the problem. This helps the developers find the cause of the problem.
Traces: Traces record the flow of a request from one end to the other. They help developers see the flow of requests and identify errors in their path.

Observability tools help to gather and analyze data like metrics, logs, and traces to diagnose issues in the system. AppDynamics, Datadog and Dynatrace are a few of the leading observability tools in the market.

Monitoring vs observability

Here’s a table for a quick summary of the difference between monitoring and observability…

Conclusion

Monitoring and observability perform similar functions but differ in terms of the depth of work. Monitoring provides surface-level insights like what the problem is while observability provides deeper insights into what caused the problem and how it is affecting the system. Moreover, observability tools can include monitoring features but it is not so the other way around. Hence, monitoring can be said as a part of a larger and advanced field which is observability.

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Periodic Table For DevOps Tools (Part – 3)

Shiwani Sharma — Tue, 07 May 2024 04:29:57 +0000

Part – 3: Periodic Table for DevOps Tools

In this blog, you will learn more about some of the remaining tools. Although there are many DevOps tools, as you have seen in the periodic table, we will only cover a few tools from separate categories.”

6. Infrastructure As Code

Cloud Formation

One of the important and powerful tool of Infrastructure as code by AWS (Amazon Web Services) provides a service known as Cloud Formation that permits and simplifies IaC (Infrastructure As Code). It also ensures the building and management of AWS resources by utilizing declarative templates instead of manual configuration. It utilized some templates such as YAML and JSON to express the crave for AWS infrastructure. The templates of cloud formation can be captured in a systems of version control such as Git that permit to collaborate with other, track the changes and they want they can come back to the old versions.

Ansible

It’s an automation platform and open-source IT configuration management tool. It uses its own playbook with modules. It doesn’t require the installation of any software on the nodes it manages, which is why it’s referred to as agentless. Within Ansible’s playbook, Ansible modules are uses. Ansible tools are utilized for managing the IT infrastructure and application as well for provisioning and configuration. It permit you to handle of explain inventory files that target host and groups.

7. Monitoring Tools

Image Credit:https://www.edureka.co/blog/devops-periodic-table/

Based on the image above, these elements are categorized under Source Monitoring tools, and we will discuss some of these tools below.”

Datadog

Established in 2010, Datadog aids frameworks like Gin, Django, and Spring. It offers a free version, but there’s also a paid version with a charge of $5 per host per month. This platform provides insights into network traffic and tag-based searching. It utilizes machine learning to detect errors and monitors cloud instances, hybrid architectures, containers, and on-premises systems. Users can gain an overall perspective by combining metric-based Network Device Monitoring with flow-based Network Performance Monitoring. Datadog is suitable for organizations of all sizes.

Nagios

Nagios is an open-source monitoring tool with a long history. It’s widely used across various industries such as healthcare, education, and finance. The cost for using Nagios is $1995. It conducts network monitoring for issues like server crashes and supports platforms like Linux, VMWare, and Microsoft. Nagios provides visual reporting and presentations. It’s suitable for organizations of all sizes.

New Relic

Established in 2008, New Relic offers detailed information and analytics to optimize applications in terms of time and transactions. It provides Real User Monitoring (RUM) and synthetic monitoring. The monthly price for New Relic is $75. Its multiple dashboards assess business domains for issues, which is a notable feature. It also provide a intense visibility into the applications and it also support the developer and IT team that recognized some mistakes and slow the transactions.

8. Collaboration & Communication

Slack

Slack is a collaboration and communication platform for businesses and teams. It’s a well-known tool that offers features like integration, file sharing, direct messaging, security, search, customization, and notifications with third-party tools. This tool can be utilized for automate tasks, streamline the workflows and do the communication more systematic within the organization and teams.

Jira

Jira, developed by Atlassian, is used to track software problems. It’s employed by software development teams to manage work and projects. It is provided in both self-hosted and cloud-hosted version that permit the organizations to select the deployment options that is best when required.

9. Cloud & Infrastructure Platform

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a Cloud Line Interface (CLI) that offers event-driven, server less architecture. It aids in office arrangement, automation, and providing useful techniques. It’s deployed in the cloud and provides users or developers with database access. While it can be used for various purposes, it’s primarily used to execute code.

Google Cloud Function

Google Cloud Function is a simple and easy platform where you only need to write your code. Google handles the operational infrastructure automatically. It’s designed for small code operations and users are charged based on usage. Some features of Google Cloud Function include no services to upgrade and manage, logging, integrated monitoring, and capabilities for multi-Cloud and hybrid scenarios.

10. Security & Compliance

Twistlock

Twistlock organizes and arranges various tools and technologies within the DevOps ecosystem. It addresses different stages of the DevOps pipeline, including testing, monitoring, security, and deployment.

Anchor

Anchor is another security and compliance tool. Many users rely on it to secure their data.

Conclusion:

As you have seen in our three parts of the periodic table, the A to Z elements are well-categorized. Now, you can choose and learn about any of the tools you want. Each element has its own preference and importance in the market. Some of the tools are very popular and chosen by many developers, while others may not be as popular, but they also have their own important features.”

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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.

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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

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DevOps Tools: What is APM and Best APM Tools in 2023 !

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 13:49:41 +0000

Understanding what is APM ? Best APM Tools in 2021

Application Performance Management refers to monitoring and managing the performance and availability of applications. As applications have evolved over the years from stand-alone to cloud-based applications, we need to manage them accordingly. So we need to understand why APM is important for any business in either the short or long run. First, you need to understand what aspects of the application you want to measure and how you are going to implement those changes to the application environment.

What is Application Performance Monitoring?

Application performance management is the process or the method that allows you to determine the performance and the user experience of an application. APM helps in monitoring the speed of the transaction occurring at both the user-end and the system. It allows you to detect potential bottlenecks and service interruptions.

Some APM features-

You can easily find out the root cause of the problem and get to its solution.
It provides a set of tools or software that helps in measuring an application’s performance, reliability to maintain an optimal level of an application.
APM uses approaches like real-user monitoring, root cause analysis, and load testing.
It makes use of WPM or web performance monitoring that checks for the application’s uptime and speed.

APM is an approach that considers every aspect of a software application to understand its nature and to continuously improve it to provide a better user experience. Today, APM is not only limited to the DevOps team and system admin but has become more available to all.

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

Why do you need APM tools?

There are many valid reasons that a company should adopt APM as an approach in their working. It not only speeds up the development lifecycle but also useful at every stage and team members throughout the application development.

It allows developers to collaborate more effectively with the operations team to ensure quality work including troubleshooting and monitoring the work progress.
It helps testers to improve their testing quality to identify the critical bottlenecks and to perform load testing on different components of the application.
It helps business leaders to monitor web transactions to ensure better productivity.
If there is an issue with the ongoing site like loading times, unnecessary interruptions can also be solved with the use of the right tools irrespective of the infrastructure and device you are using to access the web page.
It helps in performing an audit of the application code.
It provides you with detailed insights into what features are being mostly used by your customers.
APM helps you in understanding the application dependencies and uncover the related problems that occurred.
It helps in building up developers’ and other team’s confidence in the software they are building.
It helps in understanding the impact of the code change on the different components of the application and how user experience is changing.
It offers you excellent error tracking, reporting, and alerting to ensure the better performance of an application.
It also allows you to check the performance of your application on the server if the site is taking too much time to load and other errors to be encountered.
It helps in improving a company’s revenue and profit by providing a better user experience.
It helps in reducing costs by repeating the improvement work and thus reduces operational costs.

Top 10 Open-source APM tools

Below are the top 10 APM tools that you can choose for your organization as per your business requirement. Choosing the right tool can be cumbersome, so better understand the working and advantages of the tools that will suit your requirement.

Apache SkyWalking

Apache SkyWalking APM is one of the most commonly used tools and is available from GitHub. It is best suitable for teams that are working with microservices, cloud-native, and container-based architectures. It was used for tracing applications and later on, it has evolved as an APM tool with great features.

It helps in detecting the critical endpoints of an application.
It comes with multiple language support.
It helps in optimizing the application performance.
It consumes minimal resources and reduces operational costs.
It allows you to trace distributed systems and analyze topology.
It has a customized dashboard with several user-friendly features.

Pinpoint

It is another open-source APM tool from GitHub. This APM tool is best suitable for large-scale distributed systems. It is written in Java and PHP that allows the developers to monitor Java code. It’s tracking technology enables you to do an extensive analysis of the system and its components.

You can analyze the application topology and the network structure.
It helps in real-time monitoring of the applications.
It provides developers with code-level visibility in all processes.
You can install the APM agent without changing the code.

JavaMelody

This tool comes under Apache License 2.0 and monitors Java and Java EE applications in QA and production environments. It helps you to calculate the statistics based on the application’s deployment and its performance. JavaMelody can be easily integrated with Jenkins that is a plus point for developers. This tool collects application logs and interprets this data to get better visibility of any production issue.

It offers a massive amount of plugins and third-party integration.
It allows you to get customized PDF reports.
It provides you with real-time notifications and alerts.
It comes with a centralized monitoring system, database monitoring, and a real user monitoring facility.
It uses fewer CPU resources.

Stagemonitor

This tool is the best open-source suitable for Java server applications. It provides several tools and features that include testing, production, and performance monitoring of the applications.

It offers in-browser widgets for a better user experience.
It helps in the analysis of different requests with the help of the Kibana dashboard.
It allows you to monitor and gather cluster metrics.
It comes with the support of creating new plugins.

Site24X7

It is an APM tool that allows you to optimize an application’s performance in real-time. It provides you insight into your application behavior and ensures a digital experience for your customers.

It comes with AI technology that helps in identifying the sudden spikes in your application performance.
It helps you to understand how the applications will connect and communicate with other components.
You can use this tool to troubleshoot issues in a distributed architecture.
It helps you to monitor critical business transactions in real-time.
It is supported by platforms like- Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, etc.

Storage Resource Manager

This tool helps in managing the health and performance reports for your application. This tool comes with the support of multi-vendor storage devices.

This tool comes with automated storage capacity planning.
It allows you to detect a storage hotspot.

New Relic APM

This tool is SaaS-based and is suitable for browser and infrastructure monitoring.

It helps in tracking SQL queries that are making the application’s performance slow.
It helps in analyzing SQL queries with advanced alerts.
It allows you to provide code-level diagnostics and cross-application tracing.

Foglight

This is an APM tool that is used to monitor, manage, and optimize the database and virtual infrastructure’s performance. It helps in creating a customized APM solution for end-to-end management.

It allows you to monitor and diagnose the application server.
It allows you to monitor dashboards.
It helps you to monitor your middleware environment.

Compuware APM

This APM tool helps in monitoring complex applications with complete application insights.

It helps in reducing Monthly Licensing Charges.
It helps in monitoring user-experience and application performance in clouds.
It helps in reducing the number of frequently generated faults within the application.
It helps in identifying strategic tuning targets.

BMC software APM

This is an AI-powered APM tool that allows applications and business owners to support and manage their critical applications.

It helps in trending the normal performance of the application.
It allows you to define the priorities that are based on the severity of the impact on the application.
It helps in diagnosing the code-level implications and monitors the SQL queries to ensure better performance.

The post DevOps Tools: What is APM and Best APM Tools in 2023 ! appeared first on DevopsCurry.

Best Open Source Monitoring Options in 2021 for your Kubernetes Cluster

Namrata Joshi — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 14:24:25 +0000

Best Open-Source Monitoring Tools for Kubernetes in 2021

Best Open Source.. Monitoring an application’s current state is one of the most effective ways to anticipate problems and discover bottlenecks in a production environment. But it is also currently one of the biggest challenges faced by almost all of the software organizations across the globe. [Best Open Source]

Why Kubernetes is considered as the De facto standard for container orchestration?

Kubernetes has taken the container ecosystem by storm, and for good reasons. Kubernetes functions as the brain for your distributed container deployment. Kubernetes is a production-ready, open-source platform designed by Google’s using its accumulated experience in container orchestration.

Kubernetes has over 58K stars on GitHub & 2200+ contributors around the world. With the new ways of building & running applications, monitoring and observability strategies need to change.

Also monitoring Kubernetes, both the infrastructure platform and the running workloads, is on everyone’s checklist as we evolve beyond day zero and move into production.

What to Monitor?

We can try monitoring the following Kubernetes pod, node and cluster level metrices:

Container CPU and Memory Usage
Kubernetes Pod CPU and Memory Usage
Node CPU and Memory Usage
Namespace CPU and Memory Usage
Cluster CPU and Memory Usage
Container CPU and Memory Requests
Pod CPU and Memory Requests
Node CPU and Memory Requests
CPU and Memory Limits at Pod, Node and cluster levels
Kubernetes Resource Capacity

So here we bring for you some of the most popular Open-source monitoring tools to work with Kubernetes.

1. Prometheus 

Originally built at the sound cloud, Prometheus is a monitoring and alerting toolkit. It is quite popular in the development community. Now, it is governed by the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). Prometheus simplifies the process of pulling numerical metrics based on a time series from a given metrics endpoint.   It has three elements: Prometheus server, Alert manager, and Exporters. Prometheus servers look after service discovery and pulling metrics from the exporters. The alert manager is responsible for setting up alert rules, analyzing the data in the Prometheus Db. It sends alert messages to multiple receivers if a certain rule is triggered. Exporters are independent containers that can be run on your target resource to generate & export metrics via metrics API.   Prometheus is developed to collect time-series data via a pull model over HTTP. Here, multiple modes are available for graph and dashboard support.

2. Grafana 

You can monitor your Kubernetes cluster’s performance using Grafana. It is mostly used for matric analysis and visualization suite. It allows creating custom dashboards using data taken from multiple sources.   The monitoring capabilities of Grafana include:

Cluster metrics: Pod, capacity/usage, memory capacity/ usage, CPU capacity/usage, Disk capacity/usage, an overview of nodes, pods, and containers. Node Metrics: CPU, memory available, Load per CPU, Read lops, write lops, %Util, network traffic/second, packets/second, error/second.
Pod/container Metrics: Memory usage, Network traffic, CPU usage, Read lops, write lops. Grafana offers an associated product called ‘LOKI’. Loki aggregates logs in Kubernetes and integrates well with the Grafana UI.

3. The ELK Stack   

The ELK or Elastic stack is one of the most popular open-source solutions for logging Kubernetes. The ELK consists of the following things:

Elastic search- scalable and well-performer. It can handle the storage and search across millions of docs.
Logstash- Aggregate and process logs and send the processed data for storage.
Kibana- It is an analysis interface to help users make sense of data.
Beats- These are the lightweight data shippers.

The enterprise version of ELK stack ships with X-pack, a set of additional tools that enables reporting, alerting, and role-based access control (RBAC). You need to use the previously mentioned enterprise version of the ELK stack to enable RBAC.

4. Fluentd 

Fluentd is governed by a cloud-native computing foundation (CNCF). It is a specialized data collector that unifies data collection & consumption. Fluentd helps to better understand & use of data.

Additionally, Fluentd offers built-in metrics and general purpose output interfaces for centralized collectors. It is quite popular among Kubernetes users to Logstash’s facilities, especially those performances-related. Fluentd is a high performing, scalable &reliable.

It is quite easy to add new inputs or outputs with very little effect on performance. It uses disks or memory for buffering and queuing to handle transmission failures or data overload. It supports multiple configuration options to ensure a more resilient data pipeline.

5. cAdvisor   

cAdvisor is used to collect, process, and export resource usage and performance information about running containers. Like other agents, cAdvisor is not deployed per Pod but on the node level. It’s a basic tool but a very useful one.  cAdvisor is built into Kubernetes and integrated into the Kubelet binary. It automatically detects every running container on a machine and collects system metrics like memory, CPU, network, etc.

cAdvisor is capable to support multiple endpoints despite having limited functionality. However, there are some cons of cAdvisor like it’s very basic, lacks analytical depth, and has limited functionalities.

6. Kubewatch

Kubewatch watches the specific Kubernetes events and pushes notifications on these events to various endpoints. In simple words, Kubewatch is the go-to tool to receive push notifications on available collaboration applications or notification channels.   Kubewatch is easy to configure and can be deployed using either helm or a custom deployment. It will take care of changes made to specific Kubernetes resources that you ask it to watch, like daemon sets, deployment, Pods, replica sets, replica controllers, services, secrets, and configuration maps.   Users need to run it in their K8s cluster, and the event notifications will be received via webhooks.

7. Kube-Ops-View

Kube-Ops-View is not exactly a monitoring tool. It can’t be used to monitor and alert on production issues, it can give you a nice operational picture of your Kubernetes clusters. It will also have a look at the different nodes deployed and their status along with different Pods running on the nodes.
Kube-Ops-View provides a common operational picture for multiple K8s clusters. It shows the capacity and resource usage for nodes and individual pods with animation. However, it is not a replacement for Kubernetes Dashboard or a monitoring solution. It simply helps the users to quickly figure out the usage metrics without doing too much hustle.

8. Jaeger

It’s an end-to-end distributed tracing solution. Jaeger is widely acknowledged by Kubernetes practitioners as monitoring and troubleshooting best practices. The brief history of Jaeger is that it was developed by Uber, inspired by OpenZipkin and Dapper, and donated to CNCF.   When a service failure occurs, you have no idea how the requests have gone from service to service over the network to complete a single business transaction. Debugging is extremely difficult in such conditions. Jaeger user tracing to enable root cause analysis, performance, and latency optimization. Jaeger is easy to use and provides a seamless user interface along with different instrumentation options.

9. Weave Scope

Weave Scope is a troubleshooting and monitoring tool for Docker and Kubernetes. It was developed by Weaveworks. Weave Scope allows you to gain operational insights into your Kubernetes clusters. It takes a few steps ahead of Kube-Ops-View by providing a much easier and nicer user interface.   It also provides the ability to manage containers and run diagnostic commands within the interface. Users can see the application, monitor the infrastructure. It is deployed on, and the relationships between the different components.   Weave Scope is an effective tool for gaining context on your deployment. The only drawback of Weave Scope is that it lacks analytical depth.

10. Kubernetes Dashboard

It’s a Web-based, UI add-on for Kubernetes clusters. Users can create and manage workloads as well as do discovery, load balancing, configuration, storage, and monitoring. Kubernetes dashboard offers numerous features and is quite useful for small clusters & for people starting to learn Kubernetes.   This tool offers different views for CPU and memory usage metrics aggregated across all nodes. This Dashboard is widely used to monitor the health status of workloads like pods, deployments, replica sets, etc. the installation process is quite easy and can be done using readymade YAML files.

11. Kube-state-metrics

Kube-state-metrics is a Kubernetes-native metrics service designed to listen to the Kubernetes. It generates metrics without any modification to Kubernetes API. Hence, users can rely on the same grade of stability as offered by Kubernetes API.   Kube-state-metrics is an extremely essay to use and is only a metrics service. It requires a few more bit and pieces to become part of a complete monitoring solution for Kubernetes.   Kube-state-metrics exports the metrics on the HTTP endpoint in a plain text format. Real-life Kubernetes practitioners recommend Kube-state-metrics if someone is struggling to use Prometheus for K8s monitoring.

Conclusion

In this blog post we have discussed the importance of Kubernetes monitoring and also outlined an extensive list of open-source monitoring tools for kubernetes. Finally choosing a tool depends on your monitoring needs and use cases. Open-source solutions have the advantage of being backed up by large communities driven to improve existing solutions.

The post Best Open Source Monitoring Options in 2021 for your Kubernetes Cluster appeared first on DevopsCurry.

What is Continuous Monitoring in DevOps

Namrata Joshi — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 12:56:24 +0000

Companies are nowdays adopting DevOps to get faster and better response to constantly changing customer needs. DevOps works on Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment model. However Continuous Monitoring is also a very important pillar of our DevOps lifecycle (often neglected), which keeps a check on our Continuous Delivery and Deployment systems within any organisation.

What is Continuous Monitoring in DevOps?

Continuous Monitoring is a process to monitor and identify compliance issues and security risks throughout each phase of DevOps and IT operations lifecycles. Continuous Monitoring and observability can be considered as a final step of the DevOps pipeline. This is one of the most crucial steps in a DevOps lifecycle and will help to achieve true efficiency and scalability.

Continuous monitoring aka ConMon, helps organisations to track, identify, understand key metrics and also resolve application or infrastructure issues in realtime.

The aim of DevOps is to remove silos between Development and Operations team. Once the application is deployed and is available for users, Continuous Monitoring will alert the teams if there are any application issues in that environment. This will provide necessary feedback to the team. And the team can understand the parts of the application that demand additional work.

Different Types of Monitoring

Infrastructure Monitoring: it is necessary to create and maintain an IT infrastructure if your organisation depends on Information Technology to deliver products and services. So what does an IT Infrastructure include? Well, it includes everything IT related – servers, networks, data-centers, computer hardware and software, storage, etc. Managing this infrastructure is called Infrastructure Monitoring in DevOps.The sole purpose behind Infrastructure Monitoring is to collect and analyze data from the IT infrastructure and leverage that data to improve the final results.
So what all does the Infrastructure Monitoring covers ? Well it covers the hardware monitoring, network monitoring,OS monitoring and application monitoring. Some of the popular Infrastructure Monitoring Tools include Nagios, Zabbix, ManageEngine OpManager, Solarwinds,Prometheus etc

Application Monitoring: application monitoring offers runtime metrics of system performance like application uptime, application-performance,application security-monitoring,log-monitoring etc. These metrics are monitored by application monitoring tools(APM) and available to SRE/Devops or Sys-Admins. What do these metrics include? This includes transaction time, transaction volume, API responses, system response, and overall health of back-end applications. It is delivered in the form of graphical figures and statistics. These figures will evaluate application performance and ultimately overall infrastructure of an application. Some of the popular APM tools are Appdynamics, Dynatrace, Datadog, Uptime Robot,Uptrends, Splunk etc

Network Monitoring: network monitoring will monitor and track everything about the network. It is a critical process in any DevOps environment. Network Monitoring will monitor networking components like routers, firewalls, servers, switches, and VMs. In general the Network Monitoring systems(NMS) share five critical data points:

Discover
Map
Monitor
Alerting
Reporting

A NMS will find faults, measure the performance of these components, and optimise their availability. It is very important for network monitoring to be proactive. A proactive network monitoring will prevent network downtimes and/or failures. Some of the popular NMS tools include Cacti, ntop,nmap, Spiceworks, Wireshark,Traceroute, bandwidth Monitor etc.

Popular DevOps Monitoring Tools in 2020

1. Nagios : Nagios is an open-source DevOps Monitoring Tool. It will help DevOps to find and correct problems with network & infrastructure. Features:
* Simplifies the process of searching log data.
* Provides complete monitoring of desktop and server operating systems.
* The log management tool is leading in the industry.
* Provides complete monitoring of Java Management Extensions.

2. Monit: Monit is an open-source DevOps Monitoring Tool. Monit is designed especially for monitoring UNIX OS.
Features
* Conducts automatic maintenance and repair.
* Executes meaningful actions in error situations.
* Helps to monitor files, directories, and files on localhost.
* Allows network connections to different servers.

3. Consul: Consul is another open-source monitoring Tool(owned by HashiCorp). Consul is used for discovering and configuring services in any infrastructure. Features:
* The perfect tool for modern infrastructure.
* It provides a robust API.
* Easy to find services each application needs using DNS or HTTP.
* Supports multiple data centers.

4. Datadog: Datadog is a paid monitoring service, providing monitoring of servers, ,applications,databases, tools, and services through a smart SaaS platform.
Features
* Easily customizable monitoring dashboards.
* 80+ turn-key integrations.
* Complete access to APIs.
* Get visibility in the health and performance of the DevOps tools.
* Visualize data from upstream and downstream systems with metrics, traces, and logs.

5. Prometheus: open-source monitoring solution, built primarily for gathering and analysing time-series data.It uses SNMP to collect performance data from devices across the network.
Features:
* Prometheus actively scrapes data, stores it, and supports queries, graphs, and alerts
* Lowers development environment setup time.
* Works seamlessly with Mac, Windows, and LINUX.
* Very popular for monitoring containerised environments (Docker, Kubernetes)
* Integrates with existing configuration tools like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt.
* Creates a single file for projects to describe which kind of machine and software users want to install.

6. PagerDuty: PagerDuty is a paid Alerting Tool. It helps businesses to enhance the reputation of their brand. PagerDuty allows the DevOps team to deliver high performing apps.
Features:
* Data Collection via a pull model over HTTP
* It supports multiple modes for graphs and dashboards
* It works as autonomous single server nodes with no dependency on distributed storage

7. Snort: Snort is an open-source network intrusion detection system (NIDS) Snort is a powerful tools that help to detect network intruders.
Features:
* Allows real-time traffic analysis and packet logging.
* Performs protocol analysis and content searching.
* Detects buffer overflows, stealth port scans, and OS fingerprinting attempts.

8. Splunk: Splunk is a paid tool. It makes machine data accessible and usable to everyone.It is a software platform to search, analyze and visualize the machine-generated data gathered from across the components of IT ininfrastructure
Features:
* Delivers operational intelligence to DevOps Team.
* Data drive analytics with actionable insights.
* Delivers a single, unified view of various IT services.
* You can extend the Splunk platform with purpose-built solutions for security.

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