15 Must-Have DevOps Monitoring Tools in 2026

One moment, your application is running without any issue. The next day, you’re getting a lot of alerts, and your users are complaining. If you need to fix these issues, satisfy your customers, and track incidents without delays, then you’re at the right place.

In this guide, I'll show you the top 15 DevOps monitoring tools other teams are using to track incidents, stay ahead of problems, and maintain uptime. I’ll also cover their features, pros and cons, and what they are best suited for, so you can confidently choose the one that fits your stack and future growth. 

TL;DR

Below are the top 15 DevOps monitoring tools I’ve collected that make a real difference and help you and your team stay ahead.

1. Nagios

2. Prometheus

3. Zabbix

4. Datadog

5. New relic

6. ELK stack

7. Grafana

8. Splunk

9. Opsgenie

10. PagerDuty

11. Dynatrace

12. BigPanda

13. Opsview

14. Spacelift

15. Collectd

Before we take a deep dive into each tool, let’s see a quick overview of its key features, after which I'll take you into the details of each tool.

Types of DevOps monitoring 

When it comes to DevOps monitoring, understanding what to monitor is essential. Measuring and collecting the wrong metrics is as bad as not monitoring at all. Here are the main types of DevOps monitoring:

• Infrastructure monitoring

• Application performance monitoring

• Network monitoring

• Synthetic monitoring

• Dependent system monitoring

Let's have a look at the monitoring types in detail.

Infrastructure monitoring

This involves real-time tracking of the computer systems, servers, processes, and equipment that make up your computing network. With infrastructure monitoring tools, you collect data from IT components, including software and hardware units, virtual machines, data centers, networks, and disk storage.

Application performance monitoring

Application performance monitoring (APM) involves measuring the performance and availability of your applications. APM is important because it helps you identify and resolve issues before they affect the overall system's performance. You can track metrics such as the application's memory usage, hardware utilization, SLA status, platform performance, and user response times.

Network monitoring

In network monitoring, you use software and hardware to monitor the health and performance of network components, such as switches, routers, servers, firewalls, and virtual machines. Network monitoring tools track bandwidth, uptime, and bottlenecks.

Synthetic monitoring

Also known as user experience monitoring, synthetic monitoring is a form of software testing that uses behavioral scripts to simulate real end-user interactions with your application. It helps you proactively identify issues that might not arise in other types of monitoring.

Dependent system monitoring

This type of DevOps monitoring tracks the availability and performance of external systems and services that your application relies on. These external services include cloud services, third-party APIs, database systems, or other microservices. Dependent system monitoring helps you detect issues outside your application, enabling you to respond promptly to incidents and enhance system reliability. 

Importance of DevOps monitoring

You have seen the different monitoring tools in the previous section. The question is, why should you monitor at all? Some of the benefits of monitoring DevOps processes include:

Early detection and reporting of errors

DevOps monitoring tools like Nagios, Zabbix, and Prometheus help you and your team detect errors early and fix them before they impact your users. These errors range from application, system, and infrastructure errors that can degrade performance and also have a severe impact on the whole system.

Reduced downtime

With DevOps continuous monitoring tools like Datadog, New Relic, and Dynatrace, you have continuous visibility into your applications, databases, and networks, enabling you to detect and resolve issues before they cause downtime.

Improved user experience

You can use DevOps monitoring tools to monitor users' interaction with your application. This helps DevOps teams gain insight into how users experience your application across platforms, from web to mobile to custom platforms. Metrics such as page load time are important for improving user experience, and DevOps monitoring tools like the ELK Stack, Grafana, and Splunk can help visualize them.

Better collaboration

One of the main purposes of DevOps is to break silos between software development and operations teams. Using DevOps monitoring tools like Opsgenie, PagerDuty, BigPanda, and Opsview, you can improve cross-team collaboration by bringing data together in a central place where both development and operations teams can gain and share new insights.

15 must-have DevOps monitoring tools

Let's have a detailed look at the DevOps monitoring you must have in your toolkit.

1. Nagios

Nagios is a monitoring solution that helps you identify and resolve IT infrastructure issues before they affect critical business processes.

Features

• Nagios lets you monitor the components most critical to your IT infrastructure, including applications, operating systems, websites, databases, and more.

• Supports granular alert routing to the appropriate channels for resolution. 

• Provides historical records of alerts, notifications, and outages.

Pros

• Nagios solutions are on-premises, not in the cloud. It does not collect your monitoring data, which gives you more security and control over your data.

• You can monitor most of your services with Nagios out of the box, but if you want to extend its capabilities, it supports over 4,000 plugins and extensions, available on the Nagios exchange.

Cons

• The dashboard is basic and requires plugins for advanced visualization.

• The plugins need to be maintained from time to time, which leads to overhead.

Best suited for: Infrastructure monitoring.

Pricing: Free.

2. Prometheus

Prometheus is a free and open source systems monitoring and alerting tool that collects and stores metrics as time-series data. The information is stored with the timestamp of its recording. 

Features

• It consists of a multidimensional data model with time-series data identified by metric name and key/value pairs.

• The time series collection happens via a pull model over HTTP.

• Uses PromQL for queries.

Pros

• It can easily be integrated into your applications.

• It does not rely on distributed storage; rather, the single server nodes are autonomous.

• Open source.

Cons

• Limited to system and application metrics.

• You need other tools for a complete monitoring solution.

Best suited for: Scraping of application metrics you define to monitor them.

Pricing: Free.

3. Zabbix

It is an open source monitoring solution that provides a single view of your entire IT infrastructure. It monitors real-time network traffic, services, applications, and servers.

Features

• Distributed monitoring.

• Integrates with multiple messaging channels to notify the responsible team about events occurring in your system.

• Supports many types of metrics, e.g., device availability and uptime, CPU and memory statistics.

Pros

• Highly available.

• A single view for your entire infrastructure.

• Can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud.

Con: Requires extensive configuration and can be overwhelming.

Best suited for

• Monitoring IT infrastructure.

• Instant problem detection.

Pricing: Free.

4. Datadog

Datadog is a cloud-based monitoring and security platform that lets you monitor your infrastructure health, performance, and availability. It helps you identify issues, optimize operations, and improve the user experience by providing real-time visibility across your systems. 

Features

• Aggregates metrics and events across your full DevOps stack.

• Provides high-resolution metrics and events for data manipulation and visualization.

• You can automatically collect logs from all your services, applications, and platforms.

Pros

• Support integrations from different platforms such as AWS, Azure, and GCP.

• Its user interface is easy to navigate.

Con: It can get expensive fast, depending on the size of your infrastructure.

Best suited for: Infrastructure and application monitoring.

Pricing: Not free. You are entitled to a 14-day free trial, after which you will have to pay for its features starting at $15, depending on your usage.

5. New Relic

It is a platform that captures telemetry data: metrics, events, logs, and traces. New relic combines with comprehensive analytics tools to quickly find the root cause of your problem.

Features

• It is built on OpenTelemetry.

• Provides a single data layer for all metrics, events, logs, and distributed tracing.

Pro: Supports easy integration into your software stack.

Cons

• You'll need to install the New Relic agent on your servers or on each device you want to monitor, which can be a cumbersome process.

• It can get expensive quickly when your system scales.

Best suited for: Comprehensive monitoring of your entire software stack, including applications, infrastructure, and user experience.

Price: You pay for what you use. It offers a consumption-based billing model, with rates as low as $0.40/GB.

6. ELK stack

ELK is an acronym for ElasticSearch, Logstash, and Kibana. These three open source monitoring tools enable you to collect, analyze, and visualize data, particularly logs, in real-time. ElasticSearch allows you to ingest data from any source, in any format, and then sends the data to Logstash. Logstash processes the data on the server side, and Kibana visualizes and shares the transformed and stored data. 

Features

• It offers auto-scaling. As your usage grows, Elasticsearch scales accordingly.

• Has a centralized monitoring cluster to record, track, and compare the health and performance of your applications.

• It can be integrated with alerting systems, so you're automatically notified of any changes in your system.

Pros

• Easily integrates with other tools and technologies.

• It can handle large volumes of data and scale horizontally.

Con: It is not a stand-alone monitoring tool. You need to integrate it with other tools for a full-stack monitoring solution.

Best suited for: Log search, processing, and visualization.

Pricing: Free.

7. Grafana

It is an open source monitoring platform and visualization tool for querying, visualizing, and understanding your data. You can then use this data to make decisions, enhance your system performance, and fast-track troubleshooting.

Features

• You can build interactive dashboards by fetching data from various sources, such as Loki and Prometheus.

• Sends incident alerts to messaging platforms so the responsible person can act.

• Supports data query and transformation.

Pros

• Can be easily integrated with data sources, e.g., Loki, Prometheus.

• It is open source.

• It has a strong community that contributes regularly to its maintenance and development.

Con: Does not provide a full-stack monitoring solution. Has to be integrated with other tools.

Best suited for

• Creating dashboards for data visualization

• Data query

• Alert management

Pricing: The open-source version is free. There is also Grafana Pro, which starts at $19/month, and Grafana Enterprise, which starts at $25,000/year.

8. Splunk

It is a platform that collects, analyzes, and acts on machine-generated data in real time. This data powers solutions across observability, security, IT operations, and business analytics.

Features

• It has a universal forwarder that collects data from multiple sources and forwards it for indexing.

• Enables powerful and flexible data query.

• Provides real-time insights through user-friendly dashboards and reports.

Pros

• Supports cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.

• Works seamlessly and at scale, perfect for enterprise organizations.

Con: You need a subscription to access all its features, which can get expensive.

Best suited for

• Detecting, investigating, and responding to cyber threats.

• End-to-end visibility into applications, infrastructure, and user experiences.

Pricing: Offers a free license, but it has limited functionality. A subscription is required to access all features.

9. Opsgenie

Opsgenie is an incident management platform that you can use to detect critical incidents early enough and take action in the shortest possible time. It receives alerts from your monitoring systems and applications and ranks each alert based on its importance and the time it occurred.

Features

• Integrates with different communication channels, including SMS, voice, and push notifications, to keep you updated and address critical incidents quickly.

• If an alert is not acknowledged, it escalates, ensuring it receives the necessary attention.

Pro: It is easy to integrate with your existing system.

Con: Can lead to alert overload, which can be overwhelming and distracting.

Best suited for: Incident management and sending alerts when there is an issue in your system.

Pricing: Opsgenie offers a free plan for small teams with up to five users. If you have a big team and you want more advanced features, you should opt for its paid plan.

10. PagerDuty

PagerDuty is an incident management platform that aggregates all the incidents from your applications and infrastructure and routes them to the right people for resolution.

Features

• 700+ out-of-the-box integrations (Monitoring and chat).

• Provides an analytics dashboard for historical data, helping you identify areas for improvement and achieve digital operational goals.

• Has a user onboarding report that displays all user metrics, allowing you to have a full overview of all your user licenses.

Pros

• Supports integration with other monitoring tools.

• Keeps you updated on all incidents within your system.

Con: It is cloud-only and does not support on-premises or hybrid infrastructure.

Best suited for: Incident management and reporting.

Price

• Free version limited to five users per month.

• Professional plan, which costs $21/user/month.

• Business plan, which costs $41/user/month.

11. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is a monitoring platform that provides automated, intelligent infrastructure monitoring and observability across hybrid and cloud environments, delivering precise AI-powered insights.

Features

• Uses intelligent automation to detect security threats.

• Offers runtime vulnerability analytics and application protection.

Pros

• Requires minimal manual configuration.

• Saves you a lot of time with AI for threat detection.

Con: It can get very expensive when you scale.

Best suited for: Infrastructure monitoring and threat detection.

Pricing: Offers a 15-day trial period, after which you have to pay. Prices start from $0.08 per hour for 8 GiB host of full-stack monitoring.

12. BigPanda

BigPanda is an AI-powered monitoring platform for incident management and automation within AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations).

Features

• Uses machine learning and automation for monitoring.

• Provides an AI incident assistant to collaborate with you, speed up investigations, and automate resolution.

Pros

• Reduces a significant amount of manual work by utilizing AI for monitoring.

• Ideal for large enterprises.

Con: It can get expensive as you scale.

Best suited for: Incident management and resolution.

Pricing: Not free.

13. Opsview

Opsview is a DevOps monitoring platform that lets you monitor operating systems, networks, cloud environments, virtual machines, containers, databases, applications, and more.

Features

• Supports 4700+ plugins and native integrations, including Azure, AWS, and GCP.

• Performs 18M+ service checks per hour.

• Monitors 60k+ hosts per instance.

Pro: Easily integrates with other tools.

Con: It requires time and effort to configure correctly.

Best suited for: Infrastructure monitoring.

Pricing: Opsview is not free. Offers Essentials and Enterprise options.

14. Spacelift

It is an infrastructure orchestration monitoring platform that helps you provision, configure, and manage all your infrastructure orchestration workflows. 

Features

• Supports integration with orchestration tools, including Terraform, OpenTerra, Pulumi, Ansible, and Kubernetes.

• Supports collaboration and GitOps workflow.

Pro: Easy to integrate with multiple IaC frameworks.

Con: Only focuses on IaC and does not offer full monitoring capabilities.

Best suited for: Monitoring your infrastructure orchestration tools.

Pricing

• Free plan for two users.

• Starter plan, which starts at $399/month.

15. Collectd

Collectd helps you gather metrics from various sources, such as operating systems, applications, log files, and external devices, and stores the information.

Features

• Comes with over 100 plugins for metrics collection.

• Networking features.

Pros

• Open-source.

• Compatible with different systems that don’t have a scripting language or a cron daemon, such as embedded systems.

Con: Only gathers the metrics. Needs other tools for visualization.

Best suited for: Collecting metrics from your systems and performing performance analysis.

Pricing: Free.

Next steps

In DevOps, blind spots are costly. A robust monitoring strategy closes those gaps before they turn into incidents. Staying ahead in DevOps requires leveraging advanced monitoring tools.

Are you curious about DevOps? Are you a DevOps professional looking to enhance your knowledge? Check out our DevOps roadmap today and start your learning journey to become a DevOps developer.