7 DevOps SaaS tools to add to your tech stack today

Supporting the modern engineering team is a multi-faceted job. A thriving department or team — often distributed across the country or the world — relies heavily on tech to communicate, collaborate, develop, and monitor systems.

The SaaS industry has risen to this challenge, with hundreds of new apps and services coming to market. No matter what part of the development lifecycle you’re in, you can find software that helps you get your job done better and faster. 

We listed seven of our favorite apps for DevOps. These SaaS tools will help you manage your development and implementation effectively, maintain the stability of your dev environment, monitor performance, catch and remedy code errors, and more.

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1. Datadog

Trending in Vendr

Your performance metrics are a lot like vital stats. With the right visibility, teams can understand how their projects and services are functioning — effectively providing a health score for your products and company.

Datadog helps IT and DevOps teams monitor performance metrics inside an easy to integrate, customizable dashboard. It also allows you to monitor networks, storage, servers, cloud, databases, etc.

The service gives your team access to alerts for critical issues; log, latency, and error rate analysis; support for applications across a host of programming languages; and support for over 250 product integrations. The platform also integrates with communications tools such as Slack, email services, and incident management apps like PagerDuty to keep everyone informed of changes to the environment or critical issues that need attention. 

2. Looker

Trending in Vendr

For some, getting into the data is as simple as writing a SQL search and pulling out what you need. For the rest of us? There’s Looker. 

Business Intelligence (BI) is vital to unlocking the potential of your business and its data. Those sources of data flow in from potentially dozens of places. Looker makes the process of Extract-Transform-Prep (ETP) and visualization of that data much easier. This service allows people with any level of familiarity access to the important insights contained in your databases and streams.  The platform bridges the gap between development and analysis to keep everyone communicating and collaborating effectively. 

The app creates easy-to-use, appealing visualizations of the data, giving information at a glance. It achieves this by sitting on top of your database, meaning no matter your dataset size or complexity, calling for information is quick. As a cloud-based service, Looker is easy to integrate with all the tools and services you use in your organization. 

3.  New Relic

Trending in Vendr

Performance is the difference between happy customers and lack-luster reviews. When hosting a service in the cloud or on a server, don’t let your app become the victim of its own success with slow-downs or other performance issues.

New Relic helps IT teams and app developers monitor the performance of their service so they can focus on providing exceptional service and experiences, rather than worrying about performance. This service also allows you to deliver on SLAs for end-users by monitoring performance effectively. 

Within the platform, users have access to a variety of data and insights. You can see response time from every angle: from geographic location, web browser or device, time of day, and other parameters. Users can also see transactions in real-time, allowing you to troubleshoot issues by any variable, down to an individual line of code. 

The platform is highly integrative, so whether you’re into PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, or any other programming language, you can take advantage of this powerful reporting and management tool.

4. Segment.io

Trending in Vendr 

User segmentation is complex, with data flowing in from any number of streams, heading for any number of tools or uses. It’s an important component of your data services across many departments, but it helps to have these streams routed through a single API.

That’s where Segment excels. The platform takes information from over 200 tools and allows you to get the right data moving in the right direction so that your teams can improve outcomes and scale effectively. 

With Segment, Marketing won’t need to turn to development when they need data piped into their automation software. RevOps will have easy access to payments and transactional data to make good roadmap decisions. Finance can look at metrics to more clearly see the business case for purchasing software. This means more time for developers to work on higher-value tasks, while all teams have the information they need to hit the accelerator. 

The platform is easy to implement, so all your sources can be organized and connected without deep code knowledge or a steep learning curve. Segment creates all the code you need, allowing you to cut, paste, and route info to the right destination.

5. Twilio

Trending in Vendr

Communicating with your customers is a multi-channel effort, spanning potentially dozens of platforms, countries, and languages. Today’s consumers expect up-to-the-minute info throughout the sales cycle. In other words, your communication plan can’t be piecemeal. You need an API that can handle it all, so you can offer it all. 

That’s the mission of Twilio. This communications API connects you with your customers seamlessly, wherever they are. Through Twilio's integration, you can communicate with your most important people through WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, text, voice, and anywhere else your customers hang out. 

Twilio takes the stress out of multi-channel communication and customer engagement. It removes the need for intense coding, researching carrier requirements, software integrations, and legal considerations. Whether your customers are local or international, old-school or cutting-edge, you’ll be able to meet them where they are.

Better yet, this platform lets you pay for just what you need while taking advantage of every channel that your users value most.

6. Databricks

Data scientists and engineers need support to deliver the best analysis and outcomes. 

Databricks allows developers and their data experts a collaborative, zero management cloud platform. This environment is an interactive workspace to extract knowledge and value from big data. 

The Databricks platform is used by thousands of companies and enterprise-level clients for ETL use cases, data discovery, warehousing, and deployment. The tools and platform features make it easy to get the most out of your big data, effectively visualize, plan pipeline, and use your data to drive the business forward successfully.

API and integration capabilities make it easy for teams to get up and running. Databricks is currently available on Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud. 

7. Sentry

Application monitoring and error tracking play a huge role in customer support and experience. Without visibility into operations and issues within your app, customers won't have confidence in your offering, customer service can’t respond to requests appropriately, and engineering can’t address issues in a timely manner. Having a robust application monitoring system is a must. 

Sentry provides a fully-featured service to understand the performance, issues, and statistics that drive your applications. Through an easy-to-configure platform, apps can communicate in near real-time to the development team, allowing them to debug and remedy code or service issues promptly.

The system is highly intuitive, with alerts delivered through email, Slack, or other communications tools. The event report presents comprehensive information and “breadcrumbs” to help you understand the behavior producing the errors so you can resolve them.

Sentry supports all the major languages and frameworks, so no matter what front-end or back-end systems you run, you’ll be able to use the service right out of the box. 

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