Top Monitoring Tools for DevOps Engineers and SREs

In the realm of DevOps and SRE, where reliability is paramount, monitoring has transitioned from a recommended practice to an absolute necessity. Selecting the ideal tool hinges on your specific observability needs to ensure service uptime and exceptional customer experiences.

Why Monitoring Matters?

Traditionally, monitoring served as a proactive measure. Today, it’s a critical component for any product launch. It empowers you to leverage various tools to conduct meticulous monitoring checks, guaranteeing that every facet of your system or service functions flawlessly at all times.

Monitoring can be categorized based on the specific elements being monitored:

• Network Monitoring: Zooms in on all the interconnected components within a computer network, such as routers, incoming/outgoing network traffic, firewalls, switches, and other network-related data.
• Server Monitoring/Infrastructure Monitoring: Focuses on monitoring server components like CPU, memory usage, disk space, and other server-centric data.
• Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Plays a vital role in detecting application-level issues that directly impact the end-user experience. Common metrics include response time, requests per second, transactions per second, and more.

Choosing the Right Incident Monitoring Tool

The sheer number of monitoring tools available can be overwhelming. To narrow down your options, consider these key questions:

• What components require monitoring? (Network components, servers, applications?)
• What data is essential to collect? (Metrics, events, or both?)
• What’s the intended purpose of this data? (Long-term pattern observation or immediate alerting for critical issues?)
• Are data visualization capabilities a necessity? (Do you already have Grafana for this purpose?)
• What level of support does your organization require? (Are there strict SLAs to uphold?)
• Budgetary constraints for such tooling? (Is there room for multiple tools to accommodate diverse data types?)
• On-premise or cloud-based solution? (Must be compatible with your tech stack and handle future scaling or upgrades)

By pinpointing the most suitable tool(s), you can delve deeper based on the level of instrumentation required to gather the data you need.

Remember, as the Datadog blog post, “Monitoring 101: Collecting the right data,” aptly points out: “Collecting data is inexpensive, but not having it when you need it can be costly. Therefore, you should instrument everything and collect as much useful data as possible, within reason.”

The ultimate objective is to choose a tool that aligns with your observability needs and empowers you to deliver reliable services and systems for your customers.

Popular Incident Monitoring Tools

While not an exhaustive list, here are some of the most widely-used monitoring tools, along with some of their noteworthy features:

• Prometheus (Open-source): An open-source system monitoring and alerting tool used for event monitoring and alerting. It leverages a pull-based HTTP model for recording real-time metrics in a time series database, along with offering flexible queries.
• Solarwinds — Pingdom: Provides a global performance and availability monitoring solution for websites, applications, and servers. Key features include uptime monitoring, page speed monitoring, incident alerting, real-time alerts, transaction monitoring, and real user monitoring.
• Zabbix (Open-source): Functions as a real-time monitoring tool for IT components and services. This open-source software is suitable for networks, servers, virtual machines, cloud services, and is utilized across various sectors. Zabbix furnishes data metrics for network utilization, CPU load, and disk space consumption of digital assets.
• Zoho — Site 24x7: Another all-in-one tool that offers website, server, and application performance monitoring. Site24x7 is part of the ManageEngine product suite, designed to deliver monitoring health checks to maintain your system uptime.
• Nagios XI (Freemium): Formerly known simply as Nagios, this free and open-source monitoring toolkit assists with system, network, and infrastructure monitoring.

Additional Tools:

• Sensu (Open-source)
• SignalFx
• Solarwinds — Server and Application Monitor (SAM)
• ManageEngine — OpManager
• Datadog
• PRTG Network Monitor (Freemium)
• New Relic
• WhatsUp Gold
• Icinga (Open-source)

Conclusion

This curated list equips you with a solid foundation for selecting the incident monitoring tool that best aligns with your specific requirements. Remember, delve into each tool’s website to gain a comprehensive understanding of its features and how it can benefit your organization.

Squadcast is a Reliability Automation platform that integrates On-Call alerting and Incident Management along with SRE workflows in one offering. Designed for a zero-friction setup, ease of use and clean UI, it helps developers, SREs and On-Call teams proactively respond to outages and create a culture of learning and continuous improvement.