In the open-source and cloud application and tools, there are many types of software development and information-technology operations efficiencies. It is true, especially for monitoring and logging solutions.
For getting high availability, best performance, less error or inactivity and other, monitoring of cloud platforms and its applications and components is necessary. Even according to the latest survey from RightScale show that monitoring is one of the most common cloud optimization action and about 45% SMBs and enterprises consider it as majority action.
However, the known solutions for logging and monitoring solutions are a little hefty. And when these services are bundled with some attractive names, it becomes more expansive. But it is necessary to take a look at the logging and monitoring solutions to stay updated with the latest technology.
When we talk about the best DevOps tools, then all of them focus on a various targeted task like performance analysis, holistic monitoring, container cluster monitoring, alerting toolkits, multi-dimensional data collection, and querying.
Whatever it is but our concern of this article is to show you the best monitoring and logging tools with its importance. Yes, here we have made a list of some tools with their advantage. According to me, logging is an important part of software management and data security. Some people and organizations are giving it the least priority. But it is not a thing to neglect.
When there is logging error occur, you have to understand what caused the error, and due to which reason this error happens. If there is a right tool with you, you can solve this kind of error comfortably if it happened again. The right tool takes the responsibility of collecting all these details and share it with the concern people. So let’s see some of such tool in this article.
5 best DevOps Tools for Monitoring and Logging
- Fluentd
Fluentd is an open-source tool that works as your data collector. It unifies the data and shows it to you for better understanding and use. It collects data from various sources and unifies the format from all the files. Its unify logging layer, and separate data source from the system are another thing I want to mention here. With it, it provides a plugin-based architecture that allows the user to do whatever they want to do.
The unified logging provides single format logs, and extra plugging customizes the view according to the user. Now you do not have to handle logs manually. However, it takes human help whenever needed.
Advantages:
- Performance delicate parts are written in C and other than this in Ruby to give flexibility and additional functionalities
- Reliable and scalable
- Tags data and route data based according to the tags
- Provide client library in different language like Java, Python, PHP, Ruby and other
- Stores the logs as in a unified log format
- Heapster
Heapster is a metrics collection and performance monitoring tool. It is compatible with Kubernetes versions 1.0.6 and above. It does not collect the performance metrics of your pods, workloads, and container, but with it, it also collects the data of events and other signals from your cluster.
This analysis tool in Kubernetes supports CoreOS and Kubernetes natively. It can be used to run on OpenShift. It also supports a pluggable storage backend like Google Cloud Monitoring, InfluxDB with Grafana Google Cloud Logging, Riemann, Hawkular, Elasticsearch, Graphite, and Kafka.
Advantage:
- The open-source project comes with Kubernetes
- Performance monitoring and collection of metrics of cluster’s pods, events, container, workloads, and signals
- Integrate with backend
- Logstash
Logstash a centralized processing unit that processes all kind of data from all the sources. It normalized all the formats and schema. Even the custom log format is quick. It can use the add plugins for customization of the data source.
Users can cleanse and democratize the data according to personalized needs like visualization use cases or downstream analytics. This tool does not only do log collection but with it, it also goes beyond the use case.
Advantages:
- An open-source tool that is simple enough and can extend to the custom log format
- Can add plugins for custom data sources.
- Based on log parsers, it uses a regular expression. Identify the issues in advance and help to fix them
- The built-in plugin GROK filter shows regular expressions to support the common software log patterns
- GROK filter plugin help user to start quickly
- Provides a holistic view of logs and from it, the application start debugging and identify faulty points
- Supportive tool and has ample of plug-ins
- Good performance while collecting and processing big size data and logs
- Prometheus
Prometheus is community-driven and completely open-source software. This alerting toolkit and system monitoring tool. It was originally built at SoundCloud, but at present, it is a Linux Foundation’s Cloud-Native Computing Foundation project. If you are looking for the tool that fits microservices and machine-centric architectures, then it is the right choice for you. It supports multi-dimensional data collection and querying. It’s all the components. You are available on GitHub under the Apache 2 License.
The time series in the Prometheus is identified by a metric name and a set of key-value pairs. It shows data in graphs, tables, and alerts. You can visualize the data through multiple modes like a console template language, built-in expression browser, and Grafana integration.
Features:
- Dimensional data and powerful queries
- Multiple modes for visualizing data
- For reliability each server is independent and depend on local storage only
- Client libraries support about ten languages and also has a custom library
- Existing exporters allow bridging of third-party data into this tool
- Weave Scope
Weave Scope is an open-source tool from Weavework to monitor distributed applications and their containers in real-time. It is also compatible with Kubernetes and AWS ECS.
A SaaS-based app that allows DevOps teams to deploy, manage, monitor all the microservices and containers. Weave Cloud helps teams to speed up the building, managing, and monitoring the cloud-native applications.
This tool is completely integrated with all major orchestrators like Docker Engine, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and AWS. Weave Cloud integrates with Docker, and you have to choose the container orchestration platform. Weave Cloud works around the mix of orchestrators, data centers, and clouds.
Features:
- Can see your containers, services and docket hosts in real-time
- Can identify issue easily and maintain the stability and performance of your application
- Within the context of a process, host, or container; the user can see metrics, metadata, and tags.
- Easy navigation to Docker hosts form processes inside your container.
- Can view logs, launch command line, start, pause, stop and restart containers without leaving Scope
Conclusion:
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