Best DevOps Monitoring Tools Shortlist
After careful evaluation, I’ve selected these 12 tools based on their ability to provide reliable monitoring for DevOps, with some more options below:
- Nagios - Best for continuous monitoring of large port networks
- Prometheus - Best for alerts and aggregating metrics
- Splunk - Best for monitoring and searching through big data
- Sensu - Best for monitoring cloud environments
- PagerDuty - Best for monitoring server disruptions and outages
- Grafana - Best for monitoring data analytics and visualization
- New Relic - Best for SaaS full-stack observability
- AppDynamics - Best for performance monitoring for websites and mobile
- ChaosSearch - Best for centralizing log and event data in the cloud
- Dynatrace - Best for end-to-end performance monitoring for large businesses
- Buddy - Best for monitoring websites and mobile apps for small businesses
- InfluxDB - Best for monitoring time series data in a single, multi-purpose database
Trying to keep track of multiple aspects of your development pipeline, such as testing, deployment, and operations, can be overwhelming. Issues can go unnoticed until they become major problems.
DevOps monitoring tools track and monitor issues that may threaten production environments. These tools ensure users get content in a quick and efficient manner and enjoy a bug-free experience on your application.
What Is DevOps Monitoring?
DevOps monitoring is the process of keeping track of the performance and overall health of the software delivery pipeline. DevOps monitoring plays a pivotal role in helping DevOps teams identify and address performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, and other issues before they impact end users.
With DevOps monitoring tools, you can get a detailed overview of the development pipeline. This often consists of collecting useful metrics, including activity logs, CPU usage, response times, development frequency, and more.
Overviews of the 12 Best DevOps Monitoring Tools
Here’s a look at the top DevOps monitoring tools. I’ll highlight the features that each tool offers and why they deserve a spot on this list.
1. Nagios - Best for continuous monitoring of large port networks
Nagios is an open-source software application that monitors traffic networks continuously. It can track per-port bandwidth usage for inbound and outbound traffic, detect network outages, identify overutilized ports, and discover network abusers.
Why I picked Nagios: Instead of exposing my systems to vulnerabilities or worrying about slow network performance, Nagios gives my DevOps team immediate visibility of our network. I also liked it that logs information like network infrastructure issues and failed processes by the port.
Nagios Standout Features & Integrations
Features offered by Nagios ensure the security of my network ports. This includes SNMP monitoring, switch and router monitoring, network monitoring, and ping monitoring, which help me maintain the integrity and safety of my network infrastructure.
Integrations that are pre-built include Amazon SNS, Prometheus, PagerDuty, Dynatrace, and more. Also, Nagios has over 3,000 official and community plugins developers can add to their stack.
Pricing: From $1,995/user
Trial: 30-day free trial
Pros
- Open-source version is 100% free
- Lightweight for minimal resource usage
- Increases the availability of your entire network infrastructure for protocol failures and network outages
Cons
- Separate licenses are required for security and network visibility features
- Uses files instead of databases to store config files on the backend
2. Prometheus - Best for alerts and aggregating metrics
Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alert tool to collect and store metrics. It helps you monitor critical time series data, such as memory consumption, resource utilization, error rates, and incoming requests.
Why I picked Prometheus: I picked Prometheus because of how well it excels at collecting, storing, and querying metrics from HTTP endpoints. It allows you to easily expose, scrape, and query data to let you know if your infrastructure or services are working or not.
Prometheus Standout Features & Integrations
Features that make Prometheus one of the best tools on the market are its alerts and data aggregation. I can benefit from log monitoring, alert monitoring, time series collection, and metric storage and observation.
Integrations mostly include pre-built remote endpoint and storage platforms, such as Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, and Kafka. It's also possible to integrate Alertmanager webhooks for notifications on applications like Discord, GitLab, and Zoom.
Pricing: Free
Trial: Not applicable
Pros
- Uses pull metrics to parse data without installing additional programs on your containers
- Intuitive metric patterns for easy data querying
- Customizable alerts
Cons
- The documentation may lack clarity or be confusing at times
- May need to learn PromQL to query metrics.
3. Splunk - Best for monitoring and searching through big data
Splunk is a software tool that captures and indexes data, organizing it in a searchable repository. It enables the generation of alerts, reports, and visualizations from large datasets.
Why I picked Splunk: I picked Splunk because of its ability to scale and handle large volumes of data. With the increasing complexity of modern applications and distributed systems, Splunk's scalability ensures you can effectively manage and analyze logs from multiple sources without compromising performance.
Splunk Standout Features & Integrations:
Features of Splunk are designed to provide teams with greater visibility into their applications. I believe its indexing and data collection, workload management capabilities, machine learning toolkit, and intuitive data exploration tools make it a great tool for teams.
Integrations are available with pre-built plugins via Docker, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Ansible, AWS, Azure, and ServiceNow. Additionally, Splunk gives information about each integration's capabilities, allowing you to see whether your integrations can provide you with traces, logs, metrics, or metadata with Splunk.
Pricing: Pricing upon request
Trial: 60-day free trial
Pros
- Saves your searches and automatically recognizes important data
- Highly scalable and easy to implement
- Creates analytical reports and visualizes data with charts, graphs, and tables
Cons
- Can be costly, especially if your services require intensive resources
- Optimizing searches for speed can be difficult
4. Sensu - Best for monitoring cloud environments
Sensu is a continuous observability pipeline tool that lets you deliver monitoring as code in any cloud environment, so you can view all the processes in your development pipeline. If you're working with a multi-cloud platform, Sensu automates the registration or de-registration of servers, apps, and more.
Why I picked Sensu: I picked Sensu for two reasons: its ability to monitor workflows as code that can be shared with team members and its multi-cloud functionality. Developers that work on multiple platforms, servers, or cloud environments will be able to gather important metrics (like failure rates and lead times) and pinpoint or stop issues before they occur.
Sensu Standout Features & Integrations:
Features are designed to help businesses to monitor their cloud networks, regardless of their size. During my research, I noticed Sensu kept a close eye on server performance to track bandwidth usage and manage network resources.
Integrations like Elasticsearch, Prometheus, Sumo Logic, and Wavefront are pre-built for Sensu and handle times-series data and event storage applications. Sensu also integrates with auto-remediation tools like Ansible, Rundeck, and SaltStack, for automating incident response.
Pricing: From $3/node/month
Trial: 14-day free trial
Pros
- Designed for the cloud by automatically registering or deregistering endpoints
- Can monitor legacy infrastructure if required
- IoT and remote site monitoring using lightweight agents
Cons
- Not a hosted solution and runs off your infrastructure.
- Dashboard is very simple for an environment with thousands of servers.
5. PagerDuty - Best for monitoring server disruptions and outages
PagerDuty is an incident response platform that sends alerts when there's a service disruption or outage. During critical moments, it can send email notifications, SMS notifications, and phone notifications to your development team or customer base.
Why I picked PagerDuty: I picked PagerDuty because it's an excellent tool if you're running mission-critical infrastructure that you want to keep tabs on. The platform enables you to get on-call alert notifications immediately.
PagerDuty Standout Features & Integrations:
Features that stood out to me as the most useful are 100% focused on alerting teams in case systems, nodes, or application services go awry and include email alerts, mobile alerts, root cause analysis, real-time notifications, and prioritization. You can also automatically schedule and escalate issues.
Integrations include pre-built plugins AWS, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Zendesk, Atlassian, Datadog, Slack, Splunk, and more.
Pricing: From $21/user/month
Trial: 14-day free trial
Pros
- Allows you to allocate incident response to the right person or team
- Customizable alerts can be sent via email, phone, SMS, or push notifications
- Filters notifications to prioritize high-profile alerts that indicate genuine threats while reducing false alarms
Cons
- Looking for historical alerts can be difficult unless you have an exact ID
- Uses a conventional dashboard that could be more customizable for specific needs and preferences
6. Grafana - Best for monitoring data analytics and visualization
Grafana is an open-source data analytics web application that allows you to monitor important infrastructure on servers, software applications, and various services. It provides DevOps teams with the ability to visually analyze data from multiple sources, enabling them to easily filter through information.
Why I picked Grafana: I picked Grafana because it provides DevOps teams with customizable dashboards that you can modify to fit specific needs. The tool supports a variety of visualizations, including heat maps, graphs, tables, and text panels.
Grafana Standout Features & Integrations:
Features that stood out to me focused on visualization, such as dashboard templating, node graphs, status history, and times series. These features also offer panel customizations that put data sources and queries on display.
Integrations that Grafana is able to parse data sources from include pre-built plugins, including Prometheus, AWS, Azure DevOps, Cloudflare, Elastic, and Humio.
Pricing: From $29/user/month
Trial: 14-day free trial
Pros
- Offers highly configurable and customizable visualization panels
- Has the capability to retrieve data from any data source, regardless of its origin or format
- Extensive customization options for alerts, data sources, notifications, and more
Cons
- BI dashboards can be difficult to create and may require the use of plugins
- Garfana has no means to store and collect data on its own
7. New Relic - Best for SaaS full-stack observability
New Relic is a web tracking and analytics tool that monitors the real-time observability of each application component distributed across databases and servers.
Why I picked New Relic: I picked New Relic because it provides an "all-in-one" solution that monitors and analyzes all aspects of your technology stack. Having complete end-to-end visibility allows teams to get actionable insights when problems arise and promptly address and resolve them.
New Relic Standout Features & Integrations:
Features I found that make New Relic great for full-stack monitoring include application monitoring and database monitoring. Additionally, there’s availability monitoring to ensure your systems work in public or private locations around the clock.
Integrations are available with pre-built plugins such as AWS, Kubernetes, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Prometheus. You can also use native integrations like SQL Server to send queries to New Relic.
Pricing: From $49/user/month
Trial: Free plan available
Pros
- Highly feature-rich and provides the ability to write custom queries against collected instrumentation data
- Provides insights into metrics and performance even under high load and stress
- Easy agent installation that allows you to pipe data on your dashboard within minutes
Cons
- Cost can be considered high, especially for startups and even mid-sized companies
- The interface can be a little tricky due to the number of options on the screen
8. AppDynamics - Best for performance monitoring for websites and mobile
AppDynamics is a full-stack application performance management tool. It utilizes machine learning algorithms to detect performance issues, compares them to baseline metrics, and triggers alerts when necessary.
Why I picked AppDynamics: I picked AppDynamics because it focuses on application performance while also using monitoring to ensure optimal user experience. Whether you're managing a website or mobile app, AppDynamics ensures your customers don't encounter issues like timeouts or slow page load times.
AppDynamics Standout Features & Integrations:
Features I found that make AppDynamics excellent for performance monitoring include application performance monitoring (APM) and infrastructure visibility with database visibility. Additionally, end-user monitoring also caught my eye as it ensures your clients get the fastest application speeds possible.
Integrations that AppDynamics partners with include pre-built plugins like LoadRunner, Sainapse, and NeoLoad for performance and continuous delivery. AppDynamics also partners with SquaredUp, Medallia, and Quantum Metric to monitor customer experience.
Pricing: From $6/core/month
Trial: 15-day free trial
Pros
- Gives real-time info on processes that consume CPU and memory
- Depth of monitoring of web applications and infrastructure is immense
- Network visibility allows you to see the amount of bandwidth used per node
Cons
- Functionality may be overwhelming for small businesses
- No automatic application scanning; they must be defined in a config file
9. ChaosSearch - Best for centralizing log and event data in the cloud
ChaosSearch is a cloud data platform that simplifies the aggregation, indexing, and querying of log files and event data in your cloud storage. It collects data from multiple sources and uploads it to your Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage account for easy aggregation and querying.
Why I picked ChaosSearch: ChaosSearch makes working with massive amounts of data in its raw form easy for me. It revolutionizes my data management by indexing vast volumes of data without any preprocessing or transformation.
ChaosSearch Standout Features & Integrations:
Features I found that make ChaosSearch stand out are application monitoring and cloud log analysis. Additionally, its SQL analysis centralizes your SQL data into a single data source.
Integrations strongly focus on built-in Amazon services such as AWS, CloudFront, S3, and Security Lake. Additionally, ChaosSearch integrates with other popular platforms and tools, including Cloudflare, Slack, PagerDuty, FluentD, and more.
Pricing: From $0.15/GB/month
Trial: Free trial available
Pros
- Proprietary data format and index, which lowers the TCO compared to alternative solutions
- Allows you to visualize data directly on cloud object storage at a petabyte scale.
- Very quick to set up if you already have data in S3
Cons
- Limited support on other platforms that aren't Amazon S3 and GCS
- No on-premise solutions are available
10. Dynatrace - Best for end-to-end performance monitoring for large businesses
Dynatrace is an application performance monitoring (APM) that uses a built-in AI solution to help DevOps teams pinpoint performance issues. It excels in monitoring multi-platform environments, including multi-cloud, containers, microservices, and user experience.
Why I picked Dynatrace: I picked Dynatrace for its in-depth performance monitoring, which is ideal for large businesses. It offers granular visibility into customers, hybrid environments, and all aspects of your infrastructure.
Dynatrace Standout Features & Integrations:
Features I liked were those that prioritize performance capabilities, such as infrastructure monitoring and application monitoring. Additionally, Dynatrace leverages AI to continuously search for performance issues and pinpoint the root cause.
Integrations that Dynatrace partners with include Akamas, GitLab, Gremlin, NeoLoad, LaunchDarkly, xMatters, JFrog, and PagerDuty using built-in integrations.
Pricing: From $0.08/8 GB/Hour
Trial: 15-day free trial
Pros
- Leverages an AI assistant to enhance troubleshooting and help with problem resolution
- Broad observability scope, which hits down to the code level
- Very active help support desk which can answer any questions if stuck
Cons
- Learning curve for operating Dynatrace effectively
- Price makes it a downside for many small to mid-sized companies
11. Buddy - Best for monitoring websites and mobile apps for small businesses
Buddy is a web-based and self-hosted CI/CD tool that makes it easy for small businesses to build, test, deploy, and monitor their infrastructure. It comes with a simple yet intuitive user interface that allows you to quickly monitor deployments into production environments.
Why I picked Buddy: I picked Buddy for its suitability as an ideal solution for small businesses with limited infrastructure. It provides an easy setup, a user-friendly interface, and automation of monitoring tasks across development, testing, and operations.
Buddy Standout Features & Integrations:
Features that make Buddy great for small businesses are its website monitoring, mobile monitoring, and server monitoring. Additionally, it uses pipelines to monitor performance at all stages of development.
Integrations that Buddy integrates with its pipelines include built-in plugins such as AWS, Azure, Datadog, DockerHub, Google Cloud, and more. You can also integrate Buddy with messaging applications such as Slack or Telegram.
Pricing: From $29/user/month
Trial: Free plan available
Pros
- Lets you easily set up YAML files and configure your development pipeline
- Offers scalable and straightforward management of complex pipelines
- Simplifies CI/CD pipelines, making it an ideal platform for teaching junior DevOps members the fundamentals of DevOps monitoring
Cons
- May require a significant amount of memory since Buddy is self-hosted
- Insufficient documentation or training on setting up monitoring
12. InfluxDB - Best for monitoring time series data in a single, multi-purpose database
InfluxDB is a dedicated open-source database designed for time series data, enabling the collection of metrics and providing observability into applications, servers, and networks. DevOps teams opt for InfluxDB to leverage data in detecting anomalies, improving uptime, and resolving connectivity failures.
Why I picked InfluxDB: I picked InfluxDB because it’s a purpose-built tool made for handling massive volumes and events and metric data in a time series format. It not only allows me to aggregate and perform calculations on data using functions but also scan records across extensive time ranges.
InfluxDB Standout Features & Integrations:
Features that I found especially noteworthy revolve around monitoring infrastructure-based time series data. From application monitoring and network monitoring to server metrics, it covers all aspects of your environment.
Integrations that InfluxDB offers to enhance your monitoring capabilities include built-in integrations such as AWS, Grafana, Docker, Aerospike, Apache Kafka, and more.
Pricing: Pricing upon request
Trial: 14-day free trial
Pros
- Provides speed when storing and processing time-stamped data
- Adjusts data retention when your infrastructure scales up with demand.
- "Into clause" feature enables you to execute queries and write results back into the database
Cons
- Datasets with high cardinality can experience a decrease in performance.
- To effectively use InfluxDB, it is necessary to learn Flux, the querying language specific to the tool.
Other DevOps Monitoring Options
Here are a few other tools that didn't quite make it to the top 12 but are definitely worth checking out:
- Datadog - Best for monitoring application platforms on Kubernetes
- Honeycomb - Best for observing code on live applications
- Zabbix - Best for network parameter monitoring
- Jenkins - Best for executing monitoring scripts
- Elastic Stack - Best for visualizing large datasets
- Tasktop Integration Hub - Best for integrating DevOps monitoring tools
- Librato - Best for visualizing and correlating metrics
- Logstash - Best for data collection in DevOps pipelines
- Icinga - Best for checking the availability of network resources
- OpenNMS - Best for local or remote network monitoring
Selection Criteria for DevOps Monitoring Tools
Wondering how I picked the best DevOps monitoring tools? As a software engineer, I've personally tried many of these tools and used my first-hand experience to provide an objective assessment during my search.
Here's what I looked for:
Core Functionality
First, I evaluated and compared various DevOps tools specifically designed for monitoring or observability. Here's the key functionality that I required all tools to have:
- Alert and incident management in case errors occur in production or development environments
- Application and infrastructure monitoring to ensure your systems, apps, cloud, and networks can be vetted for errors or performance issues
- User monitoring to ensure optimal performance for your customer base
Key Features
To facilitate the core functionality of DevOps monitoring tools, here are the key features that I required all tools to have:
- On-demand notifications: It's crucial to communicate and address performance issues, downtime, and errors promptly to your team and users, ensuring transparency and diligent problem resolution.
- Reporting: It's not enough to collect vast amounts of data; the ability to interpret and present that data in a meaningful way is important.
- Metric monitoring: Companies collect metrics from diverse sources, such as user logins and infrastructure errors, ensuring DevOps teams make informed decisions for the present and future.
Usability
I prioritized tools that worked with in-depth visualizations or had a user interface that was easy to navigate. While all DevOps monitoring tools require a learning curve, making that journey as straightforward as possible with minimal confusion was the goal.
Pricing
Many DevOps monitoring tools follow a pricing model based on monthly payments, which typically increase based on factors such as the number of users, GBs of data utilized, or cores utilized.
You can anticipate costs based on employee count or memory consumption. However, it's worth noting that the base costs of many monitoring applications are typically below $50 per user.
Integrations
In my selection process, I prioritized tools that offer integration with various platforms, including databases, performance trackers, and other popular software applications. To make things easy, I have compiled a list of essential integrations for each system.
People Also Ask
Still wondering how DevOps monitoring tools can benefit the development process? Here are some frequently asked questions to help you out:
What types of monitoring are in DevOps?
Are there any free DevOps monitoring tools?
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Summary
DevOps monitoring tools can save companies from bugs, performance issues, and other problems that can inflict businesses in their day-to-day operations. They give you insights into valuable metrics like server response time, HTTP uptime/downtime, and CPU utilization. I hope my shortlist of DevOps monitoring tools can help you find the right solution.
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