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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

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

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.