Companies are always looking for ways to streamline processes to make things run more smoothly. One area that has many opportunities to do this, of course, is the IT department. There are so many free (and paid) tools available to automate processes and help DevOps and IT managers do their jobs better, quicker and more efficiently.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at some of our favorite application performance monitoring (APM) tools. By retrieving metrics and displaying data in an organized fashion, APM tools help IT managers with decision making in the areas of application changes, competence needs and other productivity issues.
Real User Monitoring Tools
For any e-commerce shop, customer behavior and experience is of utmost importance, and over the last decade, the prevalence and impact of Real User Monitoring (RUM) tools has evolved.
Compuware APM Real-User Monitoring for Enterprise Applications offers reliable and scalable application management and monitoring. According to Compuware, their APM “provides a complete view of all applications, for all users, all transactions, and all locations, 24/7.” The tool also helps optimize business applications including SAP, Oracle EBS and Siebel.
Zend Server supports all PHP code and provides insights into that code including popular PHP applications and frameworks like Magento, Drupal andZend Framework. Zend Server enables application monitoring and automates application deployment. It provides insight into how end-users are using your apps, shows you how your code is running as you develop it, and offers full integration with tools like Git, Jenkins, Chef and Nagios.
Dashboard tools
Two popular tools for creating intuitive and efficient data dashboards areLibrato and Geckoboard.
Librato enables easy collection, correlation, visualization and notifications about your data. It integrates easily with AWS, Heroku, or your own favorite sources to aggregate and transform your metrics with functional DSL. Interactive and dynamic dashboards enable you to compare metrics while their advanced alerting system offers customizable rules.
Geckoboard integrates with more than 80 popular services including GitHub,Amazon CloudWatch and Google Analytics, making it quick and simple to import your data. Their flexible API makes it easy to add proprietary data from your spreadsheets onto your dashboard. Geckoboard also enables you to track and analyze your numbers, spot trends and follow changes over time. Its SaaS model enables anytime access and instant setup without installations or hassle.
Alert and Notification Tools
To facilitate inter- and intra-team communication, in addition to communication with clients and partners, solutions like Slack and PagerDutyoffer a suite of tools that easily integrates with a variety of platforms and services like Skype and Google Drive to provide notifications, messaging and sharing from one platform.
Slack enables teams to create and share on open channels for projects, groups and topics. In addition, Slack integrates with RUM tools, log aggregation tools and synthetic monitoring tools like Shoppimon so that when an error is caught, the Slack integration alerts the team in real time, making it easy for individuals or teams to get real-time notifications on multiple devices. Read more about Shoppimon’s Slack integration here.
PagerDuty markets itself as an “incident command center for operations and engineers.” Through integration with your monitoring systems, PagerDuty brings effective alerting and on-call scheduling. It also easily integrates with infrastructure, application, and network performance management monitoring systems as well as existing communications platforms likeHipChat, Slack, Flowdock and Campfire.
Other Tools for IT Professionals
With the dynamic landscape of an IT professional’s daily activities, there are hundreds of tools available to make specific tasks easier to complete. When efficiency is the name of the game, it’s important to evaluate different tools to fit the needs of different teams and our list is just the beginning of what’s out there.
What tools have you introduced to your IT team? What tools can’t you live without? Let us know! We’d love to hear about what you’re using.
