7 cool tools for doing devops right

Once upon a time, developers and operations were often at each other’s throats. Production code was never updated quickly enough for developers’ liking, and administrators in charge of keeping the servers running smoothly chafed at developers’ hasty insistence on shortcutting processes and piling up serve requests.

Since the advent of devops, however, these battle lines have been falling away, thanks to tools that have arisen to bridge the gap, offering services ranging from configuration management to application portability. Here are several standout tools catching the attention of devops-minded organizations these days.

[ Download the Deep Dive: Monitoring in the age of devops. | Get a digest of the day’s top tech stories in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. ]

Splunk is a tool for finding and fixing issues in real time across the application lifecycle, allowing developers to visualize data from production environments without having to access production machines. Splunk helps users embrace devops processes, including continuous integration and deployment.

User EnerNOC, which provides energy intelligence software for electric grid operators and others, has been a Splunk user for about five years. “Splunk fundamentally changed the way we operate our production systems,” says James Nichols, principal engineer at EnerNOC. “It has enabled technical and nontechnical users to gain insights into a very complex system that would otherwise be opaque to them. We’ve had VPs, development managers, and help-desk operators set up dashboards, alerts, and dig into the data — impossible without Splunk.”