Contents
- devops-infrastructure-monitoring-zabbix
- devops-infrastructure-monitoring-prometheus
- devops-infrastructure-monitoring-datadog
- devops-infrastructure-monitoring-grafana
Roadmap info from roadmap website
Infrastructure Monitoring
Monitoring refers to the practice of making the performance and status of infrastructure visible. This section contains common tools used for monitoring. This is a very vendor-heavy space - use caution when studying materials exclusively from a given product or project, as there are many conflicting opinions and strategies in use. There is no single solution for the most substantially complex internet-facing applications, so understanding the pros and cons of these tools will be useful in helping you plan how to monitor a system for a given goal.
Visit the following resources to learn more:
Free Resources
- articleBest Practices to Optimize Infrastructure Monitoring within DevOps Teams
- articleSeven Steps to Effective Cloud Native Infrastructure Monitoring
- videoInfrastructure Monitoring Basics with Telegraf, Grafana and InfluxDB
- feedExplore top posts about Infrastructure
Comparison
| Technology | Description | Characteristics | Use Cases | Other Tech Affinity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zabbix | Open-source monitoring software for networks, servers, cloud services, and virtual machines. | - Agent-based and agentless monitoring - Highly customizable - Offers detailed data collection - Native alerting and escalation. | - Monitoring infrastructure health (physical servers, VMs, networks) - Enterprises needing extensive on-prem monitoring solutions. | - Integrates with Grafana for visualization - Supports SNMP, JMX, and IPMI - Works with various databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.) |
| Prometheus | An open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit, primarily for metrics-based monitoring of cloud-native environments. | - Pull-based metric collection - Time-series database - Supports custom metrics via exporters - Native alerting with Alertmanager. | - Cloud-native infrastructure monitoring - Kubernetes and microservices monitoring - Metrics-driven monitoring with real-time alerting. | - Integrates with Grafana for visualization - Natively integrates with Kubernetes, Docker - Exporters for various systems/services |
| Datadog | A cloud-based infrastructure monitoring platform that provides end-to-end visibility into applications, services, and systems. | - SaaS-based - Full-stack observability (infrastructure, APM, logs, security) - Auto-discovery of resources - Real-time analytics and dashboards. | - Comprehensive monitoring for cloud-native and hybrid environments - Infrastructure, APM, and security monitoring - Unified logging and tracing. | - Integrates with AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes - Works with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps tools like Jenkins, Terraform, Docker |
| Grafana | An open-source platform for monitoring and observability, focused on querying, visualizing, and analyzing metrics from multiple data sources. | - Multi-source metric visualization - Highly customizable dashboards - Supports real-time data - Can be used as a frontend for other monitoring tools. | - Visualization of metrics from multiple data sources - Building dashboards from Prometheus, InfluxDB, Graphite, Elasticsearch, etc. | - Integrates natively with Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and others - Can be combined with tools like Loki (for logs) and Tempo (for tracing) |
Key Highlights:
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Zabbix is ideal for traditional, agent-based infrastructure monitoring with strong customization capabilities and works well for on-premise, VM, and network monitoring.
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Prometheus excels in cloud-native environments with metrics-based monitoring, particularly for containerized applications, Kubernetes, and microservices.
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Datadog provides a comprehensive SaaS solution for full-stack monitoring, covering infrastructure, APM, and security with strong cloud integration and real-time analytics.
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Grafana focuses on powerful metric visualization and analysis, often paired with Prometheus, Zabbix, or other time-series databases for building highly customizable monitoring dashboards.