What tools do you use to monitor applications and business-specific data? (apart from Jenkins)

Question

Currently, we use Jenkins to run small node.js scripts in order to check if applications are doing what they're supposed to. Like, we have some routines which should run in an interval and we need to check if these routines have run and have done everything we expect.

Why Jenkins? Mostly because we can just login and look at the dashboard and see the health status of all our jobs at a glance; we can set up notifications; and because we don't know other tools to execute our scripts in a "monitoring" way.

But we know we're misusing Jenkins and the problems we have faced (like an attack we suffered which used our Jenkins instance to attack a credit card company and the constant instability) are making us look for another tool (or tools).

But all I could find was performance monitoring tools. What tools do you guys use to monitor things other than performance?

Answer 1

We use Datadog, with metrics pushed from important operational processes using the statsd protocol ( http://docs.datadoghq.com/guides/metrics/ ), so we aren't too deeply tied to Datadog on the application side.

In Datadog's interface we can then configure monitors to alert on any number of things, including anomaly detection if defining thresholds is impossible.

So for instance, we have many tasks that run on a hourly basis, they'll post a datapoint to a given metric (app.task.task_name), and we will then monitor that this metric is consistently posting at one data point per hour. If the rate changes, we get alerted.

Answer 2

I use Sparky to monitoring internal applications statuses. VSTS builds success, ssl certificates, source code consistency and so on. It fits ideally as I have a one dashboard to give me an essential information on most critical parts of the systems split across different projects and applications.

Answer 3

Where do you have your infrastructure? I've found that AWS Cloudwatch is pretty good in most simple cases. Zabbix is a good open source tool too. Of course there's Solarwinds NPM but that's quite expensive.

Answer 4

I could maybe suggest looking into Prometheus:

https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/

You can pull metrics from your app and put alerting on it, add grafana dashboards, etc.

Answer 5

I am currently using TotalCloud which integrates with AWS and CloudWatch. It is used for infrastructure monitoring and management in a single pane of glass.