Research into application monitoring, software metrics and hosted logging tools

Important information is buried in our application logs, key business metrics await to be released into the light. Computer generated logs can be processed and turned into intelligence.

Application performance metrics tools (APM) like New Relic can drill into our application logs and produce information about it

Log tools like logly, logstash or logz.io can be used to analyze data from standard applications that use syslog and produce information from those logs

Time series databases like graphite and influx db could be used to track usage of network or telephony resources including destinations called, megabits used, balance remaining. It could be more efficient than using a standalone redis to track this. It could probably be used to track live call data but it is not clear. Other metrics that could be gathered are server and network equipment usage, RAM, HARD DISK CPU utilization metrics and other stuff.

** New Relic ** is one of the oldest and better known application performance monitoring tools. Among its features are: Application monitoring including.. Application response times Time consuming transactions Performance of external services Cross application and transaction tracing

Database Monitoring: Time spent in data base calls Database call response time and throughput SQL query analysis Slow SQL Report

Alert Policies Availability Monitoring (external ping)

Reports (with custom dashboards) on Deployments Scalability SLA Capacity Availability

It has team collaboration features and has many security features on the data collected

There is a free plan capped with 24 hr retention (we will use it) and then there are PRO plans at ($149/month)

[** Stackify **] offers both a hosted log analizer and an application monitoring service. The application monitoring service checks server utilization, tracks performance of web requests and shows application errors. There is a configurable alert feature. A Charting feature for all metrics within the dashboard. It also offers a remote acces mode to access server log files. Its cost is $15 per server per month. The log analyzer feature is billed at $20 per 10 gigabits/month it has a log data viewer. with full text search and alerts. there is realtime tailing of logs and monitoring error rates.

** Logly ** Collects log data from many sources including Ngnix Mysql and from custom applications using Syslog standard Alerts can be configured. Thends can be spotted using the log visualization tools and dashboards. Triggers can be configured for third party services.

There is a free plan that caps 200/MB each day with 7-day retention (we will use it) Paid plans start at $45 month with a 1 GB each day cap and also 7-day retention

[** Graylog **] is a powerful opensource log management platform

[** Datadog **] Is a hosted monitoring service. It features multiple integrations to monitor a lot of services and applications. It has an interactive dashboard that can be customized. It has a full text search function and it is team ready. It has alerts. It allows you to push your own metrics and events with its client libraries and APIs . It has a free mode (i will use it) that allows to work with up to 5 servers with one day retention and it also has a paid more at $15 per server per month.

CUSTOM METRICS I could build dashboards using this

** Influx DB ](https://influxdb.com/) is an opensource free database that is used to collect application time series and produce metrics. it can be used with Grafana to produce dasbhoards with live information. It can sample data from many different sources and it can produce analyics on the data. It has a [ruby client**

Graphite **]() it also a graphing tool it has a [ruby client](https://github.com/kontera-technologies/graphite-api) there is a [hosted graphite service** as well starging at $19 monthly for 2 year retention, 5s resolution and 100 metrics with 2 users, next plan is $49 monthly and it brings 500 metrics and 3 users

Grafana is a graph and dashboard editor for influx db and graphite

OTHER TOOLS I WONT TEST

[** Logz **] Is a log analizer posibblly built on graphite that bills for free for upto 1Gb a day of data with 5 day retention with no alerts and no dashboards, paid plans start at 49 USD a month for 7 day retention and i3 alerts and unlimited dashboards also 1 gigabit a day limit (WILL NOT USE IT)

[** Boundary **] it very similar to datadog system with a similar cost of $15 per month per server (WILL NOT USE IT)

[** happy apps **] is a hosted monitoring and alerting system with checks for many different applications. It also has a search function. It generates a report of all the checks that are run (WILL NOT USE IT?)