Top 5 Observability Tools DevOps Teams Should Know

Observability and monitoring are the cornerstone of resilient, high-performing applications. Nearly every IT or software engineering leader we come into contact with emphasizes the importance of the ability to understand and diagnose what is going on with their applications at all times. Having clear and concise visibility into your applications is no longer optional.

Our DevOps platform, Cycle, comes baked in with some application and infrastructure-level observability to meet the needs of most applications that are deployed within the Cycle environment. While we're fully committed to a future where Cycle is the full stack for observability and monitoring, some teams like to bring their own tools. Regardless, we make it easy to integrate with your preferred vendor. As a Kubernetes alternative, most users come to Cycle from K8s with their monitoring suite built out, which we then can integrate easily into Cycle.

Observability has taken on its own foothold in the software engineering market, already creating titans of industry all while unlocking a new definition of uptime. The market in 2023 reached USD 2.3 billion and continues to grow. The tools are numerous, and the market can be overwhelming for some consumers, so our team decided to compile a list in hopes that it provides some clarity for those that are seeking solutions.

What is Observability and Monitoring?

Observability is the ability to easily measure the internal state of a system based on the data that is produced, such as logs, traces and metrics. Logs are timestamped records of events that take place in an application or system. Traces are the flow of a request throughout a system. And metrics are the numerical values that represent the performance or status of a system over time.

Monitoring is the process of collecting, aggregating and analyzing the above observability information. Monitoring can be useful to detect when something breaks rather than why, like observability.

The Top 5 Observability and Monitoring Tools That You Should Know

1. Prometheus + Grafana

The classic open-source duo is one of the more popular observability stacks in the ecosystem. Prometheus serves as the collection and storage expert while Grafana provides unique flexible dashboards and visualization tools. For teams looking for deep metric collection and alerting, this set up could be a great option for you. Although beware set up and maintenance isn't a walk in the park.

Key Features:

• Large community support
• Customizable queries and visualization
• Strong alerting and integration options

Challenges:

• Not easy to set up and customize
• Ongoing maintenance required
• Fragmented ecosystem (often requires multiple tools for full observability)

Teams with prior experience with the tools or those with a team capable of putting together a robust custom experience with Prometheus and Grafana should be confident in a great observability stack.

2. Datadog

One of the more well known observability tools on this list and in the market is Datadog. They offer a fully featured end to end observability platform, with full support for metrics, logs and traces. Good for enterprise teams with deep monitoring and alerting needs, who may have many different kinds of applications and run things at a huge scale. Recently recognized as a leader in AIOps, they seem to be making strides in the AI scene as well.

Key Features:

• Unified dashboard for metrics, traces, logs, and uptime
• Powerful APM and log correlation

Challenges:

• Pricing can be prohibitive at scale
• Some complexity in setting up dashboards

Datadog is a reliable, well known platform, great for teams of all sizes. If pricing doesn't become an issue for your team as you grow it can serve as a great observability platform for a long time.

3. Uptrace

Uptrace is a modern open-source APM built for developers who need full visibility into distributed systems without the complexity or cost of legacy platforms. It's OpenTelemetry-native, uses ClickHouse for lightning-fast queries and supports traces, metrics, logs, and service maps—all in one lightweight package. As an open-source Datadog alternative. Uptrace is ideal for teams that want to self-host or reduce cloud monitoring expenses.

Key Features:

• Native OpenTelemetry support
• Unified tracing, metrics, and logs
• Service map for understanding system dependencies
• Self-hosted and hosted options available

Challenges:

• Self-hosted version of Uptrace requires managing ClickHouse and the Uptrace backend
• May not yet have parity with every enterprise SaaS platform feature set

Many teams choose Uptrace when they want full observability without the overhead and cost of traditional APMs.

4. OpenTelemetry

The vendor neutral open-source platform, OpenTelemtry has emerged as one of the standard frameworks for collecting data across various applications and organizations. They support metrics, logs and traces similar to the other tools. Free and open-source makes it a great way to start out when adopting a new observability stack, and with drop in integrations it works for most teams. It's important to understand that OTel is not an observable backbone in itself.

Key Features:

• Drop-in integrations and instrumentation
• Community-driven
• Flexible

Challenges:

• Still maturing
• Requires a tool like Prometheus for full visibility

OTel's flexibility makes it an attractive choice for many teams and use cases, regardless of programming language, infrastructure, or run time environments used.

5. New Relic

New Relic has evolved from just a traditional APM tool into a comprehensive observability platform. Enterprises seem to be particularly a good fit from the sheer amount of observability covered and the integrations that are offered. They offer a single dashboard that supports everything you need including metrics, logs, traces and events which is an attractive option for anyone on the consolidation train.

Key Features:

• Full stack observability
• Advanced analytics
• Extensive integrations with various infrastructure

Challenges:

• Overkill for smaller teams
• Steep learning curve and can get costly

New Relic seems to play better with larger teams and those willing to take on the learning curve will find a comprehensive solution that'll suit many needs, if you can afford it of course.

Wrapping Up

As illustrated throughout this listicle, Monitoring and Observability can be pieced together through multiple tools and approaches or it can come fully out of the box. Some tools will have the integrations you need, others won't, larger enterprise ready tools come with a hefty price tag but usually for the right reason.

Monitoring and Observing critical applications can make or break your business. No one wants downtime but if you experience an outage you want to know exactly what happened and when, so you can restore for your customers. Not only that but a post mortem and making sure it doesn't happen again is just as important, and having the right tool in place to make sure you can do that is paramount.

As mentioned, Cycle comes baked in with our monitoring stack of our own, which we are building completely in house. Today, customers have visibility into their applications and bare metal or cloud infrastructure to diagnose and fix issues when appropriate. We will continue to build this out to meet the needs of our customers as we strive to be more than just a Kubernetes alternative but an all-in-one DevOps platform.

💡 Interested in trying the Cycle platform? Create your account today! Want to drop in and have a chat with the Cycle team? We'd love to have you join our public Cycle Slack community!