If you’re an experienced DevOps engineer you want to find the most efficient tools for your work. However, the variety of services available is so big that you physically can’t try them all. That’s the reason why the majority of DevOps engineers limit themselves to a shortlist of tools such as Docker, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Puppet, or Ansible without ever attempting to change anything. But many great tools fit your current tech stack and can take your efficiency to a new level. To help you, I have created this list of great DevOps tools that you probably haven’t heard about before.
It’s time to try something new! All the tools below offer trials or free plans. So you can try them and see if something fits your needs. Many of them will not replace your existing stack but supplement it.
Please, share in the comments which tools you already knew about and which you’ll try after reading this article.
StatusGator
Website: statusgator.com
Free plan: Yes, the application has a very generous free plan with ample functionality for many small DevOps teams and individuals and developers.
Paid plans start from $29.99 per month
Have you ever had a problem you’ve worked on for 3 hours in a row and only afterward discovered that the issue was in one of your third-party tools or cloud services, or that an API you use was down? This will never, ever happen again with StatusGator.
This application will help keep you informed about the state of all your dependencies and send notifications via Slack, Teams, Discord, Flowdock, email, SMS, or even webhook. StatusGator reads the status pages of around 800 cloud services, parsing them into a centralized feed for you. If you want to know if Intercom is down or not, be aware of Mailgun outages, monitor the Google Cloud status or understand the current state of any other services, StatusGator will help you to understand all this.
If you care about reducing your downtime, you should sign up for StatusGator right now. Otherwise, you’re just wasting time and not staying informed. This app has a free plan, so you don’t even need any budget to start. I saved what could have been a full day’s work when an API failed and I knew what the core reason was right away, thanks to StatusGator. So I’m ready to buy a round of drinks for the StatusGator team right now! :)
Talking about budget, the paid plan has a reasonable price and starts at only $29.99 per month. Just remember the cost of downtime to understand how worthwhile this investment is. It doesn’t take much time at all to recoup that investment.
Dead Man’s Snitch
Website: https://deadmanssnitch.com
Free plan: Yes
Paid plan starts from $5 for individuals and $19 for teams per month.
If you have daily backups or cron jobs, and you need monitoring then Dead Man’s Snitch can help you to achieve it. With this service, you can monitor Heroku Scheduler, cron jobs, or any task from any task scheduler. If something doesn’t execute, the application alerts you, so you can react in a good time.
Dead Man’s Snitch helps to create 'snitches' for every service you need to monitor. Also, the application creates a special URL for these services, thus you can make requests via a browser. It has a free plan and three different paid plans for individuals and teams.
FireHydrant
Website: https://firehydrant.io
Free plan: yes, but with limited functions
Paid plan starts from $129 per month
Like a real fire hydrant helps to put out fires, this tool will help you put out “fires” at work by receiving timely alerts and other cool features. It helps document the system, integrate the tools you already use, and gather data and alerts for handling incidents.
FireHydrant will help you to connect team members, servers, features, and applications in one infrastructure graph. With this single tool, you can finally stop using spreadsheets and automate all your documentation. Also, FireHydrant provides public customer-facing status pages , thus you can inform users promptly if you need to.
This application has a free plan with limited functions but it’s enough to understand if it suits your team. The paid plan starts from $129 per month for 5 team members. A plan for 10 members costs $600.
Clustered
Website: https://clustered.com
Free plan: Yes
Paid plan starts from $29 per month billed annually or $39 per month billed monthly
Clustered will help you with every step of the software development process. It automates many actions allowing you to concentrate on the code without infrastructure management. Clustered helps you to automate deployment and scaling, and resolve problems before your users even notice them. It can replace familiar tools like CircleCI, Jenkins, or GitLab. Thus, you can save a lot of time and reinvest it only on coding. Clustered works with Node.js, Vue.js, Python, PHP, and other popular languages. It provides CI/CD and managed container hosting in a development platform.
The main idea of Clustered is to simplify the software development process. It provides DevOps automation and container orchestration with a simple and understandable interface and lots of integrations, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. Clustered has a 14-day free trial and a paid plan from $29 to $99 per month.
RoRvsWild
Website: https://www.rorvswild.com
Free plan: yes
Paid plan starts from $39 per month
If you work with Ruby on Rails you should try RoRvsWild immediately, as it can significantly increase the efficiency of your app. This app will help you monitor the performance and errors on your project and help you understand the bottlenecks for further system optimization. It’s designed specifically for Ruby on Rails, unlike many other application performance monitoring tools.
This easy-to-use application can measure the response time for all your requests, find the slowest responses, and report their impact on the server. You can get notifications in Slack or by email. RoRvsWild has a 14-day free trial plan and the paid plan starts from $39 per month.
Appfleet
Website: https://appfleet.com
Free plan: yes
Paid plan starts from $10 per month
Do you want to stop worrying about orchestration, load balancing your traffic, and clustering? Appfleet is a cloud-based container hosting platform. It works with any tech-stack, so you can deploy your code using any language, framework, or technology. You can host the service in multiple locations at the same time and run containers in a fully managed globally distributed infrastructure.
Appfleet supports all the popular programming languages thanks to Docker containers. You can use public and private containers and can control them by connecting directly by using the Appfleet web console. The application has different plans starting from $10 per month to $500 per month (this plan includes additional business features).
Blue Matador
Website: [bluematador.com]
Free plan: Yes
Paid plan starts from $10 per month per host billed annually
Now the tool for AWS users who are tired of endless manual environment monitoring. Blue Matador is based on machine-learning algorithms that help you to understand the current state of a system.
Blue Matador provides proactive insights with no effort from you. This is like having a member of your team who doesn’t sleep and who doesn’t miss anything. This tool helps monitor the current system state and finds bottlenecks that you can remove to increase performance. Blue Matador has a free plan for up to 5 hosts and a paid plan starting from $10 per host monthly.
Cleaver
Website: https://cleaver.cloud
Free plan: yes
Paid plan not yet available, the app has only a beta version
Just like a real cleaver can cut away waste, this tool will cut all the extra actions from your workflow via automation. This is a new and developing application that helps to quickly deliver your websites and apps. At the time of publication, it has only a beta version but I decided to include it in our list as a promising tool to keep an eye on.
The tool works with Alpas, Laravel, WordPress, PHP, Node.js, and HTML. Cleaver already offers integration with AWS, Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode, and others. As a beta it has only a free plan for a limited time, so you can try it and be among the first.
Zebrium
Website: https://www.zebrium.com
Free plan: Yes
Paid plan starts from $0.75/GB logs ingested (you need to spend a minimum of $45 per month)
Are you exhausted from staring at dashboards trying to catch a problem? What if some tool could do this for you? With Zebrium you can forget about this laborious work. You need to install a lightweight log and metric collector. The application will catch incidents instead of you.
Zebrium detects anomalies in logs and uses a machine learning approach to find anomalous patterns. It helps to find unknown incidents and to detect the root cause. This tool is free for the first 30 days and after that, you can purchase one of the paid plans based on the logs volume. The minimum price is $0.75/GB logs ingested but you need to spend at least $45 per month.
Percy
Website: https://percy.io
Free plan: Yes
Paid plan starts from $29 per month
How often do you deploy new features but only catch bugs when a user decides to write to support? Do you need visual checks of your software -- something that will notify you there’s an intended change before users even notice changes? Percy is an all-in-one solution for the design, development, and delivery of software. The main focus is on visual testing and deployment. This app helps to automate manual QA adding visual testing to existing workflows and deployment to catch visual bugs.
Percy helps to integrate visual testing with different tools and languages. For example, Vue, React, Ember, GitLab, GitHub, and others. Percy has a free trial and different paid plans starting from $29 to $849 per month.
Final Thoughts
It’s not a secret that successful specialists always develop their skills, look for new tools and approaches to work, and try to automate all they can. My list of the 10 best tools for DevOps will help you to do this.
If you want to become the best of the best (I’m sure, you want, otherwise, why are you reading this article?), just set up one tool from this list and try something new in your work. Just reading can’t help you become better -- take a chance and try one of these tools for your team. All of the tools have free plans or trials, so it will cost you nothing to try.
If you don’t know what to install first, I recommend you to try StatusGator or Dead Man’s Snitch. These are both tools with basic premises that can be used by any team to save time and money. I use StatusGator and it covers a big part of my needs and now I’ve got all my DevOps friends hooked on it. Try one of these apps and share your impressions in the comments.
If you know of any other cool tools that are not on this list, write about them in the comments too.