Review: Alerting, Log Management, Visualization, APM, and Deployment Management Tools

We’re often asked about the differences and trade-offs between the tools in the Java production tooling ecosystem, so we’ve decided to release a tools guide and gather all our insights in one place. In this post you can see the topics that were covered in the guide, and additional research that we’ve done in each of these spaces. We hope you’ll find it useful.
 
 
 

Chapter 1: Alerting Tools

Alerting tools provide insight into the workings and status of your app. Some reach out to you to notify when something worth your attention pops up, some provide a dashboard for error tracking, and others test your app on a continuous basis.

Tools: Sentry, Airbrake, Raygun, Pagerduty, Pingdom.

Additional coverage:

• 5 Error Tracking Tools Java Developers Should Know

Chapter 2: Log Management

To deal with the growth of log data a host of log management & analysis tools have been built over the last years to help developers and operations make sense of the growing data. In this chapter we’ve covered the more popular log management solutions.

Tools: Splunk, Sumo Logic, Loggly, PaperTrail, Logstash, GrayLog.

Additional coverage:

• 7 Log Management Tools You Need to Know
• Log Management Tools Face Off
• Hosted ElasticSearch: Found.no, Logz.io, QBox and Others

Chapter 3: Visualization and Metrics

Being able to generate data about your app is crucial, but you also need to be able to understand it. That’s where production visualization and metrics tools come in. These tools take (or are given) your data and provide you with key metrics and/or digestible visualizations of what’s happening.

Tools: ELK, Graphite, Keen IO, Librato, DataDog.

Additional coverage:

• Graphite vs Grafana: Build the Best Monitoring Architecture for your Application
• 7 Monitoring Tools to Prevent the Next Doomsday

Chapter 4: APM (Application Performance Management)

What was once considered a luxury is becoming more commonplace: Rapid new deployments in production mean more chances to introduce errors to your system’s architecture, slow it down, and maybe even crash it. New generation APM tools, the ones we discuss in this section, are designed for these environments.

Tools: New Relic, AppDynamics, AppNeta.

Additional coverage:

• AppDynamics vs New Relic

Chapter 5: Deployment Management

Tools: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Saltstack, Fabric.

Additional Research

• Async Goes Mainstream: 7 Reactive Programming Tools You Must Know
• 15 Tools to use When Deploying Code to Production
• 7 New Tools Java Developers Should Know

Final Thoughts

It’s hard to navigate through the ever changing and evolving tooling ecosystem of the Java production tools. But it’s a critical factor for the success. We hope the Takipi blog helps you make sense out of it, and look forward to continue covering the best practices and most innovative tools of the trade. Do you have any other tools or fields you’d like us to cover? Please let us know in the comments section below.