In the DevOps Era, teams increasingly are turning to a variety of tools to integrate, accelerate and automate. Speed and efficiency are critical. This is especially amplified in continuous delivery (CD), which enables IT teams to achieve fast and reliable releases. If successful, CD allows for a faster time to market, increased operational effectiveness and getting the right product and features to production as quickly as possible and at a high-performing level.
So, what are some of the tools that can help to raise software performance? Here is a list of 14 that we at log management platform Logz.io love, some of which will be entirely new to you.
Continuous Integration Tools
Jenkins
An extensible continuous integration (CI) engine, Jenkins is a top tool for DevOps engineers who want to monitor the executions of repeated jobs. With Jenkins, DevOps engineers have an easier time with integrating changes to projects as well as access to outputs to notice easily when something goes wrong. It’s not the fastest or the fanciest tool, but it’s really easy to use, and it has a great ecosystem of plugins and add-ons. It is also optimized for easy customization.
TeamCity
TeamCity is a major all-in-one and extensible, continuous integration server. Written in Java, the platform helps developers build and test software continuously as well as monitor externally run jobs such as cron jobs and procmail jobs. It increases the scale of automation and is gaining popularity quickly in DevOps circles. The platform is supported in other frameworks and languages by 100 ready-to-use plugins. TeamCity installation is really simple and has different installation packages for different operating systems.
Bamboo
Developed by Atlassian, Bamboo does more than just run builds and tests. It connects issues, commits, test results and deployments so the whole picture is available to your entire product team, from project managers to developers and testers to system administrators. Bamboo supports builds in any programming language using any build tool such as Ant, Maven and make, as well as any command-line tool. Build notifications can be customized based on the type of event and received over e-mail, instant message, RSS or pop-up windows in Eclipse-based IDEs and IntelliJ IDEA.
(For more, a colleague of mine has published a guide to continuous integration tools.)
Load and Performance Testing Tools
JMeter
Apache’s open-source, Java-based JMeter has a user-friendly GUI, making test development and debugging much easier. JMeter has been widely used for 15 years and is now a popular open-source alternative to proprietary solutions such as Silk Performer and HP LoadRunner. One of key benefits of JMeter is that it is scalable. When you need a higher load than a single machine can create, JMeter can execute in a distributed mode—meaning that one master JMeter machine controls a number of remote hosts. JMeter also has multi-protocol support and out-of-the-box support for HTTP, SMTP, POP3, LDAP, JDBC, FTP, JMS, SOAP and TCP.
BlazeMeter
For all of the benefits that it brings, JMeter is limited in its capabilities when used as a standalone tool. For an alternative, check out BlazeMeter, a good tool that allows you to run JMeter in the cloud, increasing scalability even further and providing comprehensive test results in easy-to-read graphs. With BlazeMeter, software delivery and DevOps teams can boost their productivity by seamlessly sharing test scripts with their peers for faster feedback, deeper learning and higher performance. BlazeMeter also has easy integrations with leading CI tools including Jenkins and TeamCity.
Taurus
Continuing on the previous point, JMeter is a great tool, but it’s not perfect. Automation and integration with other systems is difficult at times, and it’s another tool to learn and master. This where a tool like Taurus comes in. Beyond JMeter, the list of popular free and open-source tools include alternatives such as The Grinder, Gatling or Locust (also a great tool for load testing, Python-based), each having its own advantages and disadvantages. Taurus is an automation-friendly testing tool that extends and abstracts the above tools (as well as Selenium), and helps to overcome various challenges. Taurus provides a simple way to create, run and analyze performance tests. The idea of Taurus is to provide language creation/configuration scripts (in JSON or YAML) in a more user-friendly way. Not only can you create scripts with Taurus, one of its many additional benefits is that you can also use pre-existing scripts.
Application Performance Monitoring Tools
New Relic APM
Application performance monitoring (APM) tools allow you to target bottlenecks with your application’s framework. New Relic is the reigning market leader—and for good reason. It lets you pinpoint precisely where and when bottlenecks are occurring. DevOps engineers can use the tool to spend less time monitoring applications and more time building and deploying. New Relic offers web request monitoring for .NET, Java and more. It automatically shows a component-based breakdown of the most important requests. A popular, reliable tool, New Relic APM is a great choice for DevOps engineers.
AppDynamics
AppDynamics is also a great tool that enables you to monitor Java, .NET, PHP and Node.js applications. AppDynamics offers performance management solutions that let developers diagnose and fix application performance problems in real time. AppDynamics’ monitoring capabilities also help to simplify the management of complex, business-critical apps.
Dynatrace
Dynatrace helps users to monitor application servers, database servers and web services. Its feature set in terms of .NET offers code-level monitoring (including CPU and wait times), end-to-end tracing and user experience monitoring. It supports the entire application life cycle, from development environments to load testing to production.
Infrastructure Tools
AWS CloudWatch
Amazon offers AWS CloudWatch, which enables operations to see usage and performance information through their APIs. AWS CloudWatch offers metrics on data transfer, disk usage and CPU utilization that can also be configured to trigger notifications and alerts whenever thresholds are exceeded. AWS users can also inject their own metrics through CloudWatch APIs to generate a comprehensive cross-analysis.
Google Cloud Monitoring (StackDriver)
Google Cloud Monitoring provides dashboards and alerts for your cloud-powered applications. Teams can review performance metrics for cloud services, virtual machines and common open-source servers such as MongoDB, Apache, Nginx and Elasticsearch. You can also use the Cloud Monitoring API to retrieve monitoring data and create custom metrics.
Virtualization and Containers
Docker
An open platform for distributed applications, Docker is an application for DevOps engineers who want to “build, ship and run any app, anywhere.” Docker makes it easier for developers and SysAdmins to push code from development to production without the inevitable hiccups that come from using different, clashing environments during the entire application life cycle. Docker is driving the trend toward microservices, in which applications are broken into smaller, self-contained components that are packaged and deployed independently as containers.
(For those who like the platform, we have a guide to Docker monitoring with the ELK Stack.)
Configuration Management Tools
Ansible
Ansible, recently acquired by RedHat, is a the Python-powered IT automation and configuration framework that allows users to manage their systems without configuration or setup. DevOps engineers can leverage Ansible to save time in application deployment, configuration management and continuous delivery, as well as when managing systems. It recently released its latest version.
Chef
Chef is a systems and cloud infrastructure framework that automates the building, deployment and management of infrastructure via short, repeatable scripts called “recipes.” But the real power of Chef is in its use of pluggable configuration modules (a.k.a., cookbooks), nearly 2,000 of which are available within the Chef community. Chef can integrate with cloud-based platforms such as Rackspace, Internap, Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform, OpenStack, SoftLayer and Microsoft Azure to provision and configure new machines automatically.
So, that’s it! What do you think of these tools? Are there any others that you prefer as alternatives? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
