Introduction of DevOps Monitoring Tools

The continuous integration and continuous deployment mentioned by DevOps are inseparable from the auxiliary role of continuous monitoring. We can imagine that when software developers submit code that is updated daily to the code base, there is a need for an immediate monitoring mechanism to detect such code changes in time, and trigger automated testing and continuous integration actions accordingly.

In order to facilitate everyone to have a more vivid and vivid understanding of the content involved in continuous monitoring, this article briefly introduces some mainstream monitoring tools as follows.

1. New Relic

New Relic is a server performance monitoring platform based on Web sites. IT system managers can use its functions to realize real-time monitoring of the performance of the servers under their jurisdiction. The monitoring results can be viewed in real time through the web-based viewing tool provided by New Relic. The specific method is to log in to Net Relic's official website address http://newrelic.com/ and register a new account on the website. According to your IT server application framework structure, choose to download and install the corresponding plug-in. The plug-in can collect relevant performance data of the monitored server. Next, as long as you visit the NewRelic website, you can see the various charts you want to visualize.

The following is an example of a graph about server performance. The index expressed in this graph is the time limit for Web transaction response.

The abscissa of the above legend is natural time, and the ordinate is the response time limit in milliseconds (ms). Can capture which application or which application transaction takes the most time, and the average opening time for each user to access the webpage, that is, from the request of the webpage to the complete loading of the entire page (including pictures, css style sheets, and javascript programs, etc.) . The average user’s tolerance of the opening time of each webpage is within 3 seconds. In the era of mobile Internet applications, especially WeChat, the tolerance of each of us to the application’s response speed has been greatly reduced.

Second, Zabbix

In the current open source market, Zabbix is famous and is the enemy of all commercial monitoring software. This is not only because Zabbix is open source, it is also a highly integrated and rich monitoring software. Zabbix provides monitoring and alarming for various IT systems with graphical display and operation interface. Zabbix can support real-time monitoring of hundreds of thousands of servers, allowing system administrators to quickly sense, locate, and solve many problems of IT systems in the face of massive server operation and maintenance.

Compared with other monitoring software, Zabbix has the following advantages:

1. The installation and configuration are very simple and the learning cost is low;

2. Support multiple languages (including Chinese);

3. Free and open source, with many maintenance volunteers;

4. It has two working modes of Agent and Proxy, which is very suitable for building distributed monitoring system;

5. Can automatically discover servers and network equipment, automatically register hosts, automatically add templates and grouping;

6. Support multiple monitoring methods to adapt to complex enterprise IT environment.

Three, Splunk
With the call of big data and artificial intelligence operation and maintenance AIOps, Splunk's product is also getting more and more attention in the industry. Splunk is not only an industry-leading log analysis software, it can integrate many fields such as big data analysis and machine learning, collect, store, index, search, correlate, and generate log data generated by the monitored IT infrastructure. Analyze and generate visual log analysis reports. The process of collecting and processing data is the process of refining and analyzing big data.

In short, continuous monitoring is a continuous integration and continuous deployment of guards, escorting the organization to implement efficient DevOps landing. Different monitoring tools have different monitoring capabilities and focus on monitoring. Organizations need to choose appropriate monitoring tools and monitoring components based on their needs.