Production support tools refer to the software and solutions used to manage, monitor and optimize applications in production environments. These tools provide visibility into key metrics that impact performance, user experience, stability and scalability. They facilitate automating repetitive tasks, enhancing collaboration, implementing changes efficiently and ensuring business continuity.

Tools for monitoring servers and applications, tracking issues, testing under load, deploying code, backing up data, diagnosing problems, and building dashboards help keep production systems running smoothly, meet service-level agreements and support business goals.

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Why are production support tools important for businesses?

Production support tools are important for businesses for several key reasons:

1. Improved uptime and reliability. Tools that monitor systems, automate tasks and facilitate preventive maintenance help minimize unplanned downtime and outages. Ensures high availability of services and meets business objectives.
2. Enhanced productivity. Automation tools reduce repetitive and manual efforts required for deploying code, patching systems, and testing changes, allowing teams to focus on high-priority and meaningful work.
3. Faster delivery. Integrated tools for building, testing and deploying code help release updates more frequently in a lower-risk and higher-quality manner. Provides greater customer satisfaction and competitive advantage.
4. Better visibility. Monitoring solutions and dashboards provide a centralized view of metrics that matter, like performance, scalability, costs, SLAs, and risks. This visibility enables data-driven insights, quick decision making and proactive optimization.
5. Improved customer experiences. The continuous integration, delivery, monitoring and optimization of applications directly impact end-user experiences. Tools for this help meet key experience objectives and metrics.
6. Resource optimization. Tools for monitoring usage patterns provide opportunities for reconfiguring, downsizing, or shutting underutilized systems and infrastructure. Help in reducing costs without impacting services.
7. Risk mitigation. Solutions for log management, issue tracking, testing under load, backups, and debugging. Help identify potential risks early. Facilitates aligned risk-based prioritization of resources and efforts across teams.
8. Compliance. Some production support tools provide the required capabilities to comply with standards like security audits, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and ISO 27001. Their usage can help maintain compliance and avoid legal and financial penalties.
9. Scalability. Tools that provide metrics on hardware utilization, process performance, and network throughput help make data-driven decisions for scaling infrastructure in a precise and cost-effective manner based on growth in needs and workloads.

Brief Overview of different production support tools

Monitoring tools

Monitoring and alerting tools are critical to the visibility of production applications and infrastructure. They provide metrics, dashboards and alerts that indicate the health, performance, usage patterns and status of servers, networks, databases, services and systems core to a business. 

These tools can promptly notify teams of any issues by collecting key metrics and identifying thresholds that constitute normal and abnormal operations. Early detection of incidents through monitoring and alerting helps limit negative impacts on services, minimize disruptions and ensure responsiveness to problems that do occur.

Popular Monitoring  & Alerting Tools

• Dynatrace – Full stack application monitoring platform. Provides code-level intelligence, intelligent autonomic features and enterprise-grade capabilities. Focused on advanced analytics, anomaly detection, diagnostics and predictive analytics across cloud, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Helpful for monitoring complex, mission-critical applications.
• New Relic – SaaS application performance monitoring tool. Focused on real-time monitoring, analytics, alerts, dashboards and reporting capabilities across cloud platforms, databases and custom applications. Useful for increasing visibility, optimizing performance and preventing outages of modern applications. Supports multiple deployment styles including microservices architectures.
• Datadog – Cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform. Provides infrastructure monitoring, application performance management, log management, process monitoring, network performance monitoring and security monitoring capabilities. Helpful for monitoring metrics, managing alerts, enhancing insights and optimizing costs across development and operations workflows.
• PagerDuty – On-call management and incident response solution. Focused on escalation management, alert routing, incident response team coordination, schedule management and reporting. Ensures incidents are responded to promptly and by the appropriate on-call staff. Useful for companies adhering to SLAs around response times and uptime.
• Uptime.com – Website monitoring service. Monitors the availability and performance of websites and web applications. Provides simple site monitoring, and professional plans with customized health checks, integrations, alerts and reports. Ensures websites meet key metrics around uptime, page load time, latency, bandwidth and HTTP status codes. Helpful for agencies, businesses, development teams and managers of websites.
• CheckMK – Self-hosted monitoring solution with agent-based checks and agentless monitoring. Supports infrastructure & network devices, virtual/physical servers, cloud environments, network devices, storage systems, applications databases and custom checks. Provides alerting, visualization, reporting, predictions, automation and remediation features. Scalable and flexible open-source solution.
• Coralogix – Real-user monitoring solution for application performance and user experience insights. Leverages synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring to provide deep visibility across the web application stack. Covers load time, latency, errors, usage and more from a real-user perspective. Ensures exceptional user experiences and minimal performance-related support tickets, drop-offs or churn.
• Centreon – Open source monitoring platform with agent-based and agentless monitoring options. Focused on IT and network infrastructure monitoring with options around servers, networks, storage, applications, databases, cloud services and more. Provides alerting, reporting, mapping, automation and orchestration features. Scalable and customizable solution for small businesses to global enterprises.

Issue tracking tools

Issue-tracking tools facilitate managing the issues, tasks, bugs and incidents that arise in building, testing, launching and supporting software and services. They provide a centralized place to log problems, prioritize risks, assign resolutions, monitor progress and ensure accountability. 

Prioritizing issues objectively based on severity, impact, urgency, and other criteria also facilitates focusing limited resources on what matters. Issue tracking tools support progress through workflows, approvals, notifications and visibility into status and closure timelines. 

• JIRA – Popular agile project and issue management tool from Atlassian. Provides issue, project, portfolio and milestone management capabilities. Useful for managing releases, releases, projects and business priorities. Supports agile methodologies including Scrum and Kanban. Scales from small teams to large enterprises.
• Trac – Open source project issue tracking tool. Focused on issue management, ticketing, version control integration, reporting and workflow customization. Useful for managing support issues, project tasks and development work items. Customizable through plugins and themes. Suitable for small to mid-sized teams.
• Redmine – Web-based project management tool written in Ruby on Rails. Provides issue tracking, project management, wiki, files, forums, news, activity reports, email notifications, Gantt charts, roadmaps, timelines and more. Can scale from small teams to large enterprises. Supports different methodologies including Kanban, Scrum and Waterfall.
• WebIssues – SaaS issue tracking tool focused on usability, customization and team productivity. Provides issue tracking, project management, wikis, file sharing, time tracking, milestone management, release management and reporting features. Easily customizable to team needs. Useful for support, development or project issue management.
• Asana – Project management and work tracking tool. Focused on task management, project scheduling, resource allocation and workflow optimization. Provides features for organizing work by project or workspace, setting deadlines, comments, file attachments, task workflows, reports and integrations. Helpful for implementing agile methodologies or coordinating development projects.

Collaboration tools

Collaboration tools enhance coordination between teams and simplify sharing knowledge in real-time. They provide channels for communication and facilitate discussions and decision-making as work progresses continuously across functions. Collaboration tools come in various forms, including Chatops solutions and workflow management tools. Regardless of category, they aim to bring stakeholders together, increase transparency, and align priorities.

Chatops tools

Chatops tools integrate chat functionality directly into the development lifecycle and DevOps workflows. They leverage messaging that teams use daily, like Slack, to facilitate conversations around code commits, deployments, issues, reviews, and more.

1. Errbot – Open source chatbot designed to be hosted on-premises. Allows user configuration of responses, workflows, plugins and more. Focused on integration with company chat clients to automate tasks and processes. Useful for implementing internal chatbots with a high degree of customization.
2. Slack – Popular team messaging app used for collaboration and communication. Provides messaging, file sharing, video calling, app integrations and workflow automation. Suitable for internal company communication and coordination. Enables chatops through integrations and automation.
3. Discord – Free voice, video and text chat app for communities and groups. Focused on communities, voice calls, video chatting and rich text messaging. Useful for gaming communities, student groups, friends and more. Integrations and bots can be leveraged for chatops processes.
4. The Matrix.org Foundation – Open standard protocol for a decentralized chat. Enables the creation of secure spaces for collaboration with free and open-source clients. Focused on privacy, security and interoperability. Integrations and bots are possible for chatops through supported clients and SDKs.
5. Element – Private team chat app focused on business communications and workflow automation. Provides encrypted messaging, video calling, file sharing and bot integrations. Useful for company chat and collaboration with a focus on productivity. Enables chatops through integrations and process automation features.
6. Zulip – Open source team chat app used for workplace collaboration. Focused on threaded discussions, searchability, bots and integrations. Suitable for collaboration at scale across distributed teams. Chatops functionality is provided through bot integrations, webhooks and Zulip’s API.

Workflow management tools 

Workflow management tools provide a visual overview of processes and handoffs between teams. They clarify dependencies, ensure accountability and highlight blockers or inefficiencies that could impact delivery if unnoticed. 

1. Trello – Visual collaboration tool with boards, lists, cards and attachments. Helps organize and prioritize tasks, projects and workflows. Useful for road-mapping epics, creating project schedules, implementing Kanban methodologies and resource allocation.
2. Asana – Project management tool focusing on alignment, communication and workflow automation. Provides task management, scheduling, resource planning, reporting and integration capabilities. Helpful for implementing Agile methodologies, scheduling releases and aligning teams.
3. Basecamp – Web-based project management tool with to-do lists, file sharing, messaging and scheduling. Focused on productivity, communication and simplicity. Suitable for managing small to mid-sized projects where lightweight management is desired.
4. Monday.com – Powerful work management tool for roadmapping, planning and organizing team projects. Provides Kanban boards, Gantt charts, reports, file sharing and integration capabilities. Useful for implementing Agile, Scrum and Kanban methodologies at scale.
5. Wrike – Collaborative work management platform. Focused on strategic planning, execution, engagement and innovation. Provides offerings for a project, program, product and IT service management. Enables alignment across stakeholders, implementation of methodologies and management of initiatives from ideation to execution.

Deployment tools

Deployment tools facilitate releasing updates and changes to applications, infrastructure and environments in a controlled, consistent and continuous manner. They automate building, testing and deploying new codebase revisions, configuration changes and infrastructure provisioning/scaling as needed to evolve systems while maintaining stability. 

Deployment tools leverage integration with version control systems, testing frameworks and configuration management databases to ensure deployments proceed according to defined workflows and process governance. By automating manual and repetitive deployment tasks, these tools minimize errors, speed up delivery cycles and increase reliability. Here are some best Deployment tools-

• AWS CodeDeploy – Managed deployment service from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Deploys application updates on-demand or during scheduled maintenance windows. Works with Amazon EC2 instances and AWS Linux and supports rollbacks. Useful for deploying applications hosted on AWS.
• CircleCI – Continuous integration and continuous delivery platform. Runs automated builds and tests and deploys applications once pass. Focused on Git-based workflow integrations and deployment workflow orchestration. Can deploy to AWS, GCP, Azure, Docker Hosted, Heroku etc.
• Octopus Deploy – Self-hosted deployment automation software. Enables deployment to on-premises environments or any cloud platform. Provides blue-green deployments, A/B testing, deployments via Git repositories and more. Focused on ease of use, security and governance across deployments.
• TeamCity – Robust CI/CD framework from JetBrains. Provides artifact management, version control integration and deployment workflows. Supports deployment to various cloud platforms, in-house infrastructure or virtual environments. Useful for deploying various application types.
• DeployBot – Slack-based tool for automating deployments from Slack comments. Monitors for special Slack comments to trigger deployments. Integrates with various deployment providers. Enables deployment initiation from Slack workspaces.
• Bamboo – Atlassian’s deployment automation tool. Provides version control integrations, artifact management, blue-green deployments, A/B testing and deployment workflow creation. Can deploy to clouds, on-premises infrastructure or CI/CD tools. Supports continuous delivery and deployment across the SDLC.
• Codeship – Hosted CI/CD platform with deployment workflow and release management focus. Simple setup with Git-based workflow support. Deploys to various cloud platforms, on-premises environments or internally hosted infrastructure. Enables automated testing and deployment processes.

Automation tools

Automation tools simplify repeating tasks and streamline workflows to maximize efficiency and minimize errors. They leverage scripting languages and configurations to automate building, testing, deploying, monitoring and managing applications and infrastructure as code.

CI/CD tools 

CI/CD tools coordinate building, testing and releasing new codebase revisions automatically upon commits to source control repositories. CI/CD tools evolve with practices like continuous deployment, canary releases, A/B testing and feature flags which provide more flexibility and control over release schedules.

1. Wercker – Managed CI/CD platform for faster development cycles. Provides pipelines as code, GitOps workflows, deployments and rollbacks. Focused on a simple and opinionated workflow for CI/CD.
2. GoCD – Self-hosted CI/CD tool. Focused on ease of use, flexibility and preventing brittle build pipelines. Provides workflows for planning work, automating builds, testing and deploying. Scales from small teams to large enterprises.
3. Jenkins – Popular open-source automation server. Used to automate building, testing, and delivering or deploying applications. Provides the means to tie separate parts of the build, test, and deployment process together into an integrated automation pipeline. Scalable and extensible through extensive plugin support.
4. GitLab – Complete DevOps platform with CI/CD built-in. All dev workflows (code, dips, packages) are built-in. Focused on simplifying complex toolchains and maximizing transparency across builds, deploys and releases. Supports git repositories, CI/CD pipelines, CI/CD jobs, testing, packages, warehouses and more in a single tool.

Scripting tools

Scripting tools facilitate automating repetitive tasks like deployments and configurations. Scripting languages provide the syntax for writing reusable automation that can be leveraged across the stack. Some popular choices for Scripting include Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PowerShell, Bash and Tcl. 

1. VuGen – Record and replay tool for load testing web, mobile and API-based applications. Captures real user sessions and converts them into reusable load test plans. Helps determine if applications can handle the expected load during peak times.
2. JMeter – Open source tool for load testing and performance measurement. Can be used to test the performance of static and dynamic websites, web services, databases, LDAP, FTP, E-Mail servers, telephone services etc. Useful for testing application scalability and performance under load.
3. TruAPI – API testing tool for creating automated API tests. Allows recording API calls and exporting them into various programming languages (Java, C#, Python, etc.). Helps ensure API stability and catch issues before API launches to production.
4. Selenium – Popular open-source tool for automating testing of web applications across many browsers and platforms. Uses a recording and playback approach to create automated test cases in C#, Java, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, PHP, and more. Helpful for automating web application testing and increasing test coverage.
5. DevWeb – Real-time API mocking tool for API testing. Creates API mocks for your APIs instantly based on your Swagger/OpenAPI specs. Easily generate requests to test APIs and see responses instantly. Useful for testing APIs in isolation before integrating with other systems.

Backup and recovery tools

Backup and recovery tools provide snapshots of applications, infrastructure, databases and files to ensure the continuity of business-critical IT services. They enable restoring systems and data after outages, corruption issues, cyber incidents or natural disasters by facilitating drafting backups and recovering from them as needed.

Backup and recovery tools become essential as organizations increasingly rely on technology. They help minimize disruption and data loss by capturing and securing copies of digital assets that can be rebuilt if any issues impact availability or integrity.

• Disk Drill – Data recovery tool for Windows and Mac. Can recover files from recycle bins, partitions, logical drives and more. Useful for recovering accidentally deleted files.
• Zerto – Cloud-based disaster recovery solution. Takes continuous data snapshots and replicates them to the cloud, enabling fast RPOs (recovery point objectives) and RTOs (recovery time objectives). Helpful for business continuity if an on-premise disaster occurs.
• Rubrik – Enterprise backup and data protection platform. Performs policy-based backup, replication, archiving and search across on-premise and cloud environments. Scales from small enterprises up to global enterprises.
• Clonezilla – Open source tool for disk imaging, cloning and backup. Can create disk images, clone drives, backup disks and more. Helpful for disk imaging, disk cloning and straightforward disk backups.
• Backblaze – Unlimited backup storage service for $50/year. Uploads and continually backs up all your files to the cloud. Great for offsite backup of personal files and ensuring files exist even if originals are lost or corrupted.
• Cohesity – Helps enterprises simplify backup and recovery for multi-cloud environments. Consolidates backup workloads onto a single platform and scale protection across clouds. Useful for data protection at scale for large enterprises.
• Veritas NetBackup – Enterprise backup and data protection software from Veritas. Provides backup, archive, replication, restore and search across on-premise and cloud environments. Scales from small businesses to global enterprises.
• Commvault Complete Data Protection – Data protection solution purpose-built for Enterprises with complex workflows and a large volume of data/workloads. Performs backup, replication, archiving and search across on-premise and cloud infrastructures. Seamlessly protects mission-critical workloads at scale.

Troubleshooting tools

Troubleshooting tools diagnose issues impacting applications, infrastructure, networks, databases and systems. They facilitate finding the root causes of problems to enable faster resolution and prevent reoccurrence.

These tools reduce the time to detect, diagnose and resolve issues compromising service availability, integrity or user experiences. Yet troubleshooting tools must balance comprehensive coverage with manageable complexity to avoid straining limited resources or hampering velocity. 

• Perimeter 81 – Calculates the perimeter of an area with 81 units. Useful for networking diagrams.
• Pathping/MTR – Measures network latency, packet loss and recovery between network endpoints. Helps locate latency or connectivity issues.
• Ping – Sends ICMP echo requests to determine if a destination is reachable and measures round trip time. Basic network connectivity and latency check.
• Tracert/ Trace Route – Shows each hop a packet takes to reach its destination. Helps identify where packets are being delayed or dropped along the network path.
• Obkio – Website that monitors website load time, page load speed, uptime and latency. Helpful for determining slow website performance issues.
• Ipconfig/ ifconfig – Displays network interface configuration and settings like IPv4/IPv6 addresses, subnets, MAC addresses, DHCP information, etc. Useful for troubleshooting network interface or IP address problems.
• Speed test – Measures bandwidth, ping/latency and download/upload speeds. Helps determine if slow network speeds are due to low bandwidth or high latency.
• Protocol Analyzer – Captures and analyzes network packets in detail. Helpful for troubleshooting issues that are difficult to replicate or unclear in nature.
• Netstat – Lists active network connections, routing tables, interface statistics, IP address/port usage and more. Useful for determining unknown network connections, ports in use or interface issues.
• Wireshark – Powerful network protocol analyzer. Captures packets in great detail and allows in-depth analysis of network activity. Helpful for solving obscure network problems and optimization.

In conclusion, production support tools provide the means for building, delivering, running and continuously optimizing software and services essential to business operations. They encompass solutions for monitoring system health, tracking issues, enhancing collaboration, automating processes, facilitating deployments, ensuring backup and recovery, enabling troubleshooting, and simplifying testing when needed.

These production support tools facilitate achieving more with less through visibility, automation and integration while maintaining control in an era of constant change. They ensure that the systems powering business objectives remain optimized, secure, and poised to deliver value for years.

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