Monitoring Survey 2015 - Tools
In this series I am looking at the results of my recent monitoring survey and specifically the monitoring tools being used by respondents. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the survey got 1,116 responses of which 884 were complete.
This post will cover the question:
5. What tools do you use for monitoring? (Choose all that apply)
Every respondent was required to answer question five. Last year I asked about primary tools and forced respondents to select a single “primary” tool. Feedback indicated that this artificially constrained respondents and many people struggled to select a single tool. This year I allowed respondents to select all tools that they used for monitoring.
Monitoring Tools
This graph shows the monitoring tools selected. The clear winner this year is again Nagios. This suggests that advances in monitoring approaches are still potentially embryonic and evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
Interestingly however the next two most popular choices are AWS Cloudwatch and New Relic. This data suggests a few interesting potential trends:
- We’re starting to see more SAAS-based monitoring.
- People are potentially using New Relic and the like as an Application Performance Management or APM tool in conjunction with other tools.
- With CloudWatch it is also possible that companies that use AWS hosting are using this to supplement and feed into existing monitoring.
Also interesting is that the number of Sensu users has doubled from last year. That’s fairly rapid growth but is only half the usage of Nagios.
There’s also a large number of home-grown tools, 230 people responded that they have a home-grown tool. That’s six times the number who indicated they had a home-grown tool last year. As a result I’ll be adding a question or questions to attempt to unpack that in next year’s survey.
Note: You can find last year’s results in this blog post
Other Tools
This is the breakdown of the Other category. 363 respondents specified other tools not specifically listed in Question 5. This table shows the summary listing of all other tools specified.
| Other tools | Count |
|---|---|
| SolarWinds | 23 |
| Pingdom | 21 |
| Check_MK | 19 |
| ELK | 19 |
| Shinken | 18 |
| Munin | 16 |
| Splunk | 13 |
| Graphite | 13 |
| AppDynamics | 12 |
| Cacti | 10 |
| PRTG | 10 |
| HP | 10 |
| Consul | 9 |
| Monit | 9 |
| LogicMonitor | 9 |
| Monit | 9 |
| OpenNMS | 9 |
| NetCrunch | 8 |
| Prometheus | 8 |
| Dynatrace | 8 |
| Observium | 7 |
| OMD | 7 |
| Nimsoft | 6 |
| Collectd | 6 |
| Ganglia | 6 |
| Circonus | 5 |
| Dataloop | 5 |
| Op5 | 4 |
| Scout | 4 |
| Sentry | 4 |
| SignalFX | 4 |
| Grafana | 4 |
| Rackspace Cloud Monitoring | 4 |
| Stackdriver | 3 |
| Hyperic | 3 |
| Statsd | 3 |
| NodePing | 3 |
| CopperEgg | 3 |
| Monitis | 3 |
| What’s Up | 3 |
| PagerDuty | 3 |
| Smokeping | 3 |
| Netcool | 2 |
| MongoDB Manager Service | 2 |
| OpenTSDB | 2 |
| naemon | 2 |
| SPM | 2 |
| Bosun | 2 |
| Flapjack | 2 |
| Kibana | 2 |
| BMC | 2 |
| CA | 2 |
| StackDriver | 2 |
| New Relic | 2 |
| Loggly | 2 |
| Tivoli | 2 |
| Azure AppInsights | 2 |
| PCP/Vector | 2 |
| Uptime robot | 2 |
| Sysdig Cloud | 2 |
| Graphite-beacon | 1 |
| Opsware | 1 |
| Alerta | 1 |
| graphite-pager | 1 |
| ScienceLogic EM7 | 1 |
| Netuitive | 1 |
| ServerSpec | 1 |
| Seyren | 1 |
| Sitescope | 1 |
| NMSaaS | 1 |
| Intermapper | 1 |
| SNMP | 1 |
| Opsmatic | 1 |
| Logwatch | 1 |
| Monasco | 1 |
| Big Brother | 1 |
| Wavefront | 1 |
| Boundary | 1 |
| locust | 1 |
| Server density | 1 |
| Elasticsearch | 1 |
| torrus | 1 |
| LibreNMS | 1 |
| Metrics.net | 1 |
| Fluentd | 1 |
| ITRS Geneos | 1 |
| Argo | 1 |
| uptrends | 1 |
| Livewatch | 1 |
| vRealize Operations | 1 |
| MonYog | 1 |
| Jennifer | 1 |
| Icinga2 | 1 |
| mon | 1 |
| Pulseway | 1 |
| diamond | 1 |
| Moogsoft | 1 |
| CloudMonix | 1 |
| www.cronalarm.com | 1 |
| VividCortex | 1 |
| Runscope | 1 |
| Rancid | 1 |
| Catchpoint | 1 |
| Truk | 1 |
| Kubernetes | 1 |
| Gomez/Compuware | 1 |
| Nagios | 1 |
| COTS | 1 |
| Graylog | 1 |
| Tensor | 1 |
| Elastic Watcher | 1 |
| ruxit | 1 |
| SumoLogic | 1 |
| Neustar | 1 |
| Traverse | 1 |
| Squash | 1 |
| The Dude | 1 |
| RightScale | 1 |
| Geckoboard | 1 |
| Pandora | 1 |
| VeeamOne | 1 |
| StatusWolf | 1 |
| Keymetrics.io for NodeJS | 1 |
| Logsene | 1 |
| WebNMS | 1 |
| Cloudhealth | 1 |
A lot of the use cases here appear to be more domain-specific monitoring: network specific tools like SolarWinds and Pingdom or log management tools like the ELK stack and Splunk.
Newcomer Prometheus also appeared with 8 respondents stating they used it.
Finally it was also interesting to see 9 respondents report using Consul for monitoring. There was a strong negative reaction to a recent post suggesting that approach.
In the next post I’ll look at what environments people monitor.
P.S. I am also writing a book about monitoring.
The posts: