DevOps is a combination of culture, practices, and tools that integrates software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to accelerate the release of software applications and services.

In traditional software development, development and operations teams often work in silos, leading to delays, errors, and miscommunication. DevOps addresses these challenges by fostering collaboration and communication between teams throughout the Software Development Life Cycle.

In this post on top DevOps monitoring tools, you’ll discover key tools that help ensure the optimal performance and reliability of your applications.

What is DevOps Monitoring?

DevOps monitoring involves tracking the performance and functionality of software applications across their entire lifecycle—from planning and development to integration, testing, deployment, and operations. It provides a real-time, comprehensive view of software applications, services, and infrastructure status.

Simply put, DevOps monitoring is a continuous process of identifying, tracking, analysing, and reporting on various components of the software development pipeline. This includes continuous planning, development, integration, testing, deployment, and operations.

By implementing DevOps monitoring, development teams can improve efficiency by detecting and addressing potential issues before code is released to production.

To fully leverage the benefits of DevOps monitoring, organisations can use specialised tools that enforce best practices throughout the DevOps lifecycle. Now, let’s explore some of the top DevOps monitoring tools available.

1. New Relic

New Relic is a comprehensive DevOps monitoring tool that provides complete observability across the software stack. It offers DevOps teams a unified platform that integrates four key telemetry data types: events, logs, metrics, and traces. This centralised approach allows teams to monitor and analyse all aspects of their software stack in one place, streamlining the monitoring process.

Why is New Relic a Top DevOps Monitoring Tool?

• Monitors browser and mobile sessions, offering insights into the end-user experience.
• Provides visibility into servers, on-premises virtual machines, and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Supports both real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring, allowing teams to assess application performance from multiple perspectives.
• Operates on a pay-as-you-go model, ensuring users only pay for the data they use.
• Includes a free monthly data ingestion limit of 100 GB, making it cost-effective and accessible for smaller organisations.
• Automatically links logs, errors, and traces, accelerating root cause analysis by revealing relationships between different software stack components.

2. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is a powerful DevOps monitoring tool designed to analyse software application logs without impacting server performance. Its efficient architecture enables it to operate within the application process while maintaining a low memory footprint of under 10 MB, minimising server overhead. Additionally, Dynatrace does not require server restarts to add or remove agents, saving both time and resources.

Why is Dynatrace a Top DevOps Monitoring Tool?

• Goes beyond log testing by providing in-depth performance insights, such as execution phase durations and transactional flow.
• Detects issues and errors in production workflows, helping teams quickly resolve problems.
• Identifies deviations from performance benchmarks, flags unusual activity in applications or networks, and sends real-time alerts.
• Offers a clear, easy-to-understand overview of application performance, making it accessible to both technical and non-technical users.
• Provides unified monitoring for multiple components, including real users, applications, cloud environments, servers, networks, and infrastructure.
• Features an effortless deployment process with automated dependency discovery, reducing setup time and potential errors.
• Supports a wide range of technologies, including WebUI, Java, Node.js, and .NET-based applications.

3. Datadog

Datadog is a cloud-based DevOps monitoring tool designed to track performance metrics and events across infrastructure and cloud services. With extensive integrations, it enables DevOps teams to monitor cloud environments and gain real-time insights into infrastructure health.

Why is Datadog a Top DevOps Monitoring Tool?

• Open source, allowing easy code analysis and transparency in metric collection.
• Sends notifications to the right individuals when critical alerts are triggered.
• Offers built-in integrations for popular web servers, programming languages, databases, and code repositories.
• Includes pre-configured dashboards for each installed integration, making it easy to access key metrics and visualise data.
• Allows users to customise dashboards for a complete view of multiple services and applications.
• Enhances monitoring and collaboration by integrating with LambdaTest, enabling bug logging during cross-browser testing from LambdaTest’s real device cloud to Datadog.

4. Splunk

Splunk is a powerful DevOps monitoring tool designed for analysing machine data. Widely adopted in DevOps, it stands out as the only solution that offers comprehensive monitoring, searching, and analysis of machine-generated data while being analytics-driven, full-stack capable, and OpenTelemetry-native. Its web-based interface centralises relevant data, making it easy to locate and correlate critical information.

Why is Splunk a Top DevOps Monitoring Tool?

• Offers built-in monitoring support for various technologies, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes.
• Provides deep visibility into data from networks, servers, and applications.
• Integrates AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) to detect and verify unusual data changes instantly.
• Features AI-powered troubleshooting, enabling rapid identification and resolution of errors.
• Allows the creation of custom reports and dashboards for enhanced visibility and error detection.
• Analyses data from diverse sources, making it a comprehensive solution for monitoring machine-generated data.
• Includes the Splunk Light feature, which simplifies deployment by transferring data from multiple servers to the main Splunk engine for analysis.
• Indexes data to generate powerful analytical insights, helping organisations pinpoint areas for improvement with high precision.
• Provides customisable reports and dashboards that deliver actionable insights, enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions quickly.

5. BigPanda

BigPanda is a cloud-based DevOps monitoring tool that automates build processes and monitors workflows and deployments. Leveraging machine learning, it correlates and aggregates monitoring data from various sources, providing a unified view of system health.

Why is BigPanda a Top DevOps Monitoring Tool?

• Provides an API that allows developers to design and manage workflows, configuring build steps such as Docker image creation and AWS Lambda functions.
• Performs root cause analysis of incidents, helping DevOps teams identify and prevent recurring issues.
• Includes customisable dashboards and reports for real-time visualisation and analysis of monitoring data.
• Integrates seamlessly with popular DevOps tools like PagerDuty, Jira, and Slack, ensuring smooth workflow incorporation.
• Supports monitoring across multiple cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, and GCP.

6. Kibana

Kibana is an open-source analytics and visualisation platform widely used as a DevOps monitoring tool. Often paired with Elasticsearch, it enables developers to analyse and log data from various sources, providing an interactive interface for exploring Elasticsearch indices. Originally created as an open-source project by Elastic, Kibana has evolved into a standalone monitoring tool used by organisations for advanced analytics and data visualisation.

Why is Kibana a Top DevOps Monitoring Tool?

• Offers powerful querying capabilities, including data aggregation and filtering.
• Allows users to create and customise visualisations such as line, bar, and pie charts to fit specific needs.
• Features a quick and straightforward setup process, making it easy to get started.
• Enables real-time data exploration to quickly identify and resolve issues in software applications.
• Includes an auto-highlighting function that detects potential issues in log files, making troubleshooting more efficient.
• Provides graphical representations of log files, offering clear insights through real-time statistics and visual data.
• Monitors and analyses multiple data stacks stored in Elasticsearch.
• Supports centralised monitoring across multiple Elastic Stack deployments (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash), simplifying data comparison.
• Allows users to configure retention policies to manage stored data and automatically discard outdated information.
• Generates automated alerts for key metrics, including cluster status, license expiration, and other critical ELK stack parameters.

7. Liquibase

Liquibase is a DevOps monitoring tool designed to track database deployment status across enterprise environments, ensuring seamless collaboration between departments, business units, and applications. By automating SQL script execution monitoring, Liquibase minimises human errors and simplifies database auditing and deployment tracking.

Why is Liquibase a Top DevOps Monitoring Tool?

• Simplifies database auditing by automating deployment tracking.
• Automatically monitors deployments and errors, enabling quick issue identification and resolution.
• Provides on-demand access to deployment information for users and administrators.
• Streamlines the release process, making it easier to track, audit, and resolve database deployment issues.

8. Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source automation server, widely used for continuous integration (CI) and DevOps monitoring. It helps developers build, test, and deploy software applications by automating processes and monitoring application performance.

Why is Jenkins a Top DevOps Monitoring Tool?

• Highly popular for implementing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
• Open-source and free to use, with customisation options to fit specific DevOps workflows.
• Supports a wide range of plugins that integrate with other DevOps tools, enabling full automation of tasks like source code management and building a complete DevOps pipeline.
• Extensible, allowing developers to add custom functionality through plugins and scripts.
• Provides real-time CI/CD pipeline monitoring, allowing teams to track deployment progress effectively.
• Integrates with LambdaTest, enabling automation of Selenium scripts from Jenkins CI to LambdaTest for cross-browser testing.

9. Middleware

Middleware is an observability platform built for cloud-native environments, offering robust infrastructure monitoring capabilities. It provides real-time visibility into on-premises and cloud deployments, allowing DevOps teams to monitor various components such as applications, processes, servers, containers, events, and databases. With its comprehensive insights, Middleware helps teams efficiently manage and maintain their infrastructure.

Why is Middleware a Top DevOps Monitoring Tool?

• Consolidates metrics from multiple sources into a single, unified dashboard.
• Supports infrastructure monitoring for Kubernetes, Docker, and microservices.
• Offers a scalable cloud-based solution, adapting to growing infrastructure needs.

10. Sensu

Sensu is a cloud-based DevOps monitoring tool, primarily used for monitoring application solutions and infrastructure. It excels in measuring the performance and functionality of software applications, business KPIs, and infrastructure, particularly within large-scale and dynamic environments.

Why is Sensu a Top DevOps Monitoring Tool?

• Open-source monitoring framework written in Ruby, offering flexibility and customisation.
• Features a dedicated API designed for monitoring large-scale dynamic systems, including setting thresholds for numerous metrics.
• Provides comprehensive visibility into cloud systems and protocols, including Kubernetes.
• Enables detailed system and service health monitoring using custom scripts and Nagios-style plugins.
• Offers auto-remediation capabilities, automatically triggering service restarts or custom scripts when errors are detected.
• Includes numerous integrations with incident management tools, web and automation platforms, data tools, and cloud platforms.
• Sends alerts and notifications when issues are found in applications or infrastructure.
• Supports dynamic client registration and de-registration, simplifying the monitoring system’s client management.
• Effectively monitors complex environments without downtime.
• Ideal for automating processes, such as restarting services or triggering backups when specific conditions are met.

11. ChaosSearch

ChaosSearch is a DevOps monitoring tool that revolutionises continuous monitoring and log management by combining data indexing with data lake economics. It offers a unique approach for managing and analysing logs from multiple sources, making it a top choice for DevOps teams.

Why is ChaosSearch a Top DevOps Monitoring Tool?

• Easily integrates logs and event data from various sources, storing them in Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage buckets.
• Uses proprietary technology to index data, enabling fast analysis without the need for migration or a separate ETL process.
• Supports SQL querying, full-text search, and machine learning for advanced data analysis.
• Simplifies data retrieval, helping teams quickly find relevant information for monitoring and analysis.
• Handles massive data volumes, indexing over 1,000 million documents and delivering results quickly.

12. Elastic Stack

Elastic Stack is a powerful DevOps monitoring tool consisting of three open-source tools: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. It is widely known for its capabilities in log analysis, monitoring, SEO, troubleshooting, compliance, and business intelligence.

Why is Elastic Stack a Top DevOps Monitoring Tool?

• Open-source and free to use, eliminating software licensing costs.
• Offers centralised logging, allowing for the collection of server logs from cloud environments into a single, searchable index.
• Provides various hosting options, including the ability to install and manage it on local servers for organisations with the necessary resources.
• Enables real-time monitoring and interpretation of data, converting it into visual representations such as graphs and histograms for easy analysis.

13. Icinga

Icinga is an open-source DevOps monitoring tool designed to ensure the optimal performance and functionality of various components within a software system. It allows DevOps teams to deploy automatic checks and monitor critical aspects of infrastructure, such as servers, network devices, applications, and services.

Why is Icinga a Top DevOps Monitoring Tool?

• Checks the availability of network resources and notifies teams if any issues are detected.
• Allows regular monitoring of software applications, services, and infrastructure, sending alerts when something goes wrong.
• Generates actionable data for performance reporting to help teams make informed decisions.
• Compatible with Nagios plugins and configuration files, providing flexibility for customisation.
• Highly adaptable, enabling teams to tailor the tool to meet specific monitoring needs.
• Offers multiple notification methods, including email, SMS, and Slack, so teams can receive alerts through their preferred communication channels.
• Seamlessly integrates with other DevOps tools, such as Puppet and Chef, enhancing its utility and functionality.

14. Grafana

Grafana is an open-source DevOps monitoring tool that serves as an analytics and interactive visualisation platform. It allows DevOps teams to monitor and analyse data from multiple sources, presenting it using a flexible and pluggable panel architecture.

Why is Grafana a Top DevOps Monitoring Tool?

• Integrated alerting feature, compatible with other alerting systems like Alertmanager, to keep teams informed.
• User-friendly interface that enables easy creation, editing, and sharing of dashboards.
• Offers dashboard templating for customisation, allowing you to tailor the dashboard setup to meet specific needs.
• Supports generating annotations on graphs and pulling data from a wide variety of data sources.
• Includes kiosk mode and playlist options for displaying dashboards on TV screens while hiding unnecessary interface elements.
• Extends functionality with plugins such as Zabbix, Influx Admin Panel, and more.
• Provides easy-to-code alert hooks, enabling the creation of custom notifiers for various notifications and alerts.

15. AppDynamics

AppDynamics is a robust DevOps monitoring tool designed to provide continuous monitoring of applications, infrastructure, and networks across on-premises and cloud environments. It helps DevOps teams collect data from various sources, including APIs, database transactions, and end-user sessions, offering a comprehensive view of the system’s health and performance.

Why is AppDynamics a Top DevOps Monitoring Tool?

• Supports a wide range of platforms, including Microsoft Azure, IBM, Kubernetes, AWS, and more, making it a versatile solution for monitoring different technologies.
• Utilises machine learning-driven root-cause diagnostics, allowing teams to quickly identify and resolve performance issues.
• Enables real-time monitoring, troubleshooting, and issue resolution for applications, ensuring prompt action when problems arise.
• Provides a set of tools, such as real-time monitoring, root cause analysis, and custom dashboards, to thoroughly test software before release.
• Does not require code instrumentation and allows teams to create dashboards to track metrics without writing any code.
• Easily monitors hybrid environments, helping organisations transition to the cloud or manage a mix of on-premises and cloud resources.