26 DevOps Automation Tools that SaaS Loves in 2023 | Blameless

DevOps is a term combining “development” and “operations”. It involves the use of tools and processes to minimize the time and effort spent on software creation and maintenance.

Many DevOps technologies use automation to reduce manual tasks. These DevOps automation tools sometimes use AI-based technology to remove human-based operations, or simpler scripting and processing. This increases speed in feedback and performance between development and operations departments.

Here, we’ll further break down DevOps technologies and discuss the top DevOps automation tools for 2023.

What Are DevOps Automation Tools and Why Should SaaS Companies Use Them?

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Automation and deployment tools in DevOps remove room for error by reducing manual and repetitive tasks in:

• IT
• Development
• Operations

SaaS businesses benefit from enhanced workflows and efficiency for fast delivery of high-quality software products.

Some of the major advantages of using DevOps as a SaaS include:

Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD)

Continuous integration (CI) relates to code building and testing, while continuous delivery (CD) focuses on production and release. DevOps implements automation in CI/CD to promote consistent and efficient testing, deployment, and update delivery.

Enhanced Efficiency and Speed

Developing, testing, and distributing software takes time. DevOps automation tools minimize the number of manual tasks required during each step of the software journey.

With fewer human errors to backtrack and fix and improved efficiency, the entire process is expedited.

Scalable Resources

Software resources aren’t one size fits all. Bespoke programs require different levels of configuration and development. DevOps technologies provide scalability. Flexible automation lets you define individual settings for cloud services, virtual machines, and more totally automatically.

Flexible automation control offers software businesses control to allocate resources as needed.

Consistency and Duplication

Automation makes it easy to replicate development processes in software. For SaaS companies, this simplifies duplication and repeatability between products and processes. It guarantees each product meets the same benchmarks.

Consistency through DevOps automation tools prevents configuration drift. Each product and deployment are consistent, no matter the process or environment.

Reporting and Feedback

DevOps technologies use automation to integrate feedback for real-time reporting. Notifications are sent automatically to alert staff to issues and updates as they occur.

Advanced access to infrastructure metrics allows for ongoing improvement and access to user preferences and behaviors.

Amplified Compliance

Deployment tools in DevOps increase security and privacy standards which in turn enhance compliance. Automation technology includes scanning for vulnerabilities, compliance alerts, and security testing.

Team Collaboration

DevOps automation tools make collaboration possible throughout your company from development to operations and beyond. The ability to communicate from coding to task management speeds development and distribution. Better communication leads to fewer surprises and errors.

In short, SaaS businesses can count on DevOps automation tools for streamlined development and deployment through:

• Enhanced speed
• Cross-program collaboration and communication
• Increased efficiency
• Organization
• Consistency
• Compliance and security features

Each of these factors makes software faster to produce, distribute, and replicate.

Top DevOps Automation Tools by Category

Now that we’ve covered the benefits of DevOps technologies for SaaS, let’s take a closer look at the top DevOps automation tools and how they work. Each tool is organized by category and use.

Incident Management Tools

Incident management tools lower the risk of software incidents. They catch and resolve problems through support, incident tracking, communication among team members, real-time incident updates, speedy resolution times, consistency, and more. Here are five tools to try.

1. Blameless

‍Blameless offers incident resolution support through RCA (root cause analysis), designated incident response teams, tracking and alerting integration, incident retrospectives or postmortems, and automatically tracked metrics for reliability analytics. Blameless also offers a learning library for ongoing learning in incident management.

2. PagerDuty‍

For mobile escalation and real-time incident tracking, PagerDuty is top-of-the-line. Its advanced integration setup provides seamless incorporation of multiple tools and applications. Intelligent alerting keeps business owners apprised of issues as they become apparent.

3. ServiceNow‍

ServiceNow offers a native mobile interface to triage and tackle incidents in a user-friendly atmosphere. Built-in machine learning and a single-pane agent view with AI recommendations simplify incident management tasks for IT professionals.

4. OpsGenie

OpsGenie by Atlassian, is sent notifications by your monitoring system.
Alerts are tackled by different applications based on the alert type and urgency. If alerts aren’t caught by the correct department, Opsgenie escalates the notification for you.

5. xMatters‍

xMatters offers a free trial to business-end users. Its incident management system promises buildable automated workflow, analytics reporting, actionable alerts, and continuous improvement.

Measurement Tools

Measurement tools collect and analyze performance-based information. Data is processed and organized for future optimization. These are some of the top measurement tools in the industry.

6. New Relic‍

New Relic measures Apdex (customer satisfaction), CPU usage percentage, average response time, load average, error rates, throughput, and memory percentage usage. NewRelic measures data through defect metrics, MTTR (mean time to recovery) MTTD (mean time to detection), service level objectives, and more.

7. Datadog‍

This tool ranks high in measurement because of its fast feedback, and superior organization. Datadog measures and observes operational changes and development for enhanced visibility across your organization. Measurements report in real-time

8. Pingdom‍

Pingdom reduces time spent tracing incidents by providing measurement analytics through root cause analysis. It aims to improve interactions through continuous reporting.

9. Dynatrace‍

Dynatrace measures performance through full-system monitoring. From hosts and processes to networks, Dynatrace measures response time, usage, and more.

10. Splunk‍

The Splunk platform uses specialized metrics storage indexes. Metrics are collected in real-time from various points of technology, including applications and internal infrastructure. It prides itself on being a cost-effective DevOps resource.

Continuous Testing Tools

Continuous testing is the conducting of regularly scheduled automated tests. They update with each code change and are a necessary part of your software delivery stream. Here are a few continuous testing tools to test for yourself.

11.  Selenium‍

Selenium uses TDD, or Test-Driven Development, as part of its main process. It automatically cycles a set of test units at each level of software development. The testing continues until it’s passed, with a new test cycle beginning at the next stage of development. It runs with programming languages including Ruby, Python, Java, and more.

12.  JUnit‍

Junit is an open-source test resource for Java and the JVM. Version 5 is the latest and most “programmer-friendly” testing framework currently available from JUnit. JUnit has a built-in reporter for printed results.

13.  TestNG

TestNG is a super scalable automated testing system. It offers advanced reporting capabilities across various devices and browser versions. TestNG’s data provider annotation system provides customization between software types.

14.  Cucumber‍

Cucumber is a great beginner DevOps continuous testing tool. It uses plain language and is a leading DevOps automation tool in BDD (Behavior Driven Development).

Continuous Delivery Tools

Continuous delivery (CD) is the continued upgrading, testing, and building of software through DevOps resources. Continuous delivery tools provide automation for consistency in code and user environments. Here are some of the best continuous delivery tools to try this year.

15.  Jenkins‍

Jenkins provides access to global software developers to create, test, and distribute products. Jenkins operates as an open-source server, using automation to support users.

16.  Circle CI‍

CircleCI is an automated test-to-deployment platform offering continuous delivery of workflow optimization.

17.  Travis CI‍

Travis CI is another continuous delivery service supporting building and testing of software. It was the first of its kind to offer free services to open-source projects.

18.  GitLab CI/CD‍

GitLab CI stands apart as a continuous integration and deployment service. It focuses on code during the build and deployment of software and specializes in out-of-the-box toolchain maintenance.

Monitoring Tools

Monitoring tools suss out potential problems before they occur. Automated monitoring removes these issues for enhanced system performance. They enhance the user experience and provide better-performing software programs. These are some of the best monitoring tools available today.

19.  Prometheus‍

For Kubernetes and other cloud-native platforms, Prometheus is a great monitoring tool. It pulls and stores analytics, organizing each metric with a timestamp and label. Prometheus is open source.

20.  Nagios‍

Nagios is another open-source DevOps automated tool for monitoring. It’s used on software applications, networks, and servers to detect and fix infrastructure issues.

21.  Zabbix‍

Zabbix looks after the health of networks and applications with customizable notification configuration. Alerts are sent by email and include various parameters of platform or network data. Zabbix is also an open-source solution.

22.  SolarWinds‍

SolarWinds provides insightful automated monitoring through switches, load balancers, firewalls, and other devices. It’s recognized as one of the top NPMs (Network Performance Monitors) available in 2023.

Configuration Management Tools

Configuration management is a key part of creating consistency and efficiency in software. DevOps configuration management tools automate processes necessary for understanding and tracing software updates and changes. Here are a few of the key players in configuration management.

23.  Ansible‍

Ansible starts and manages remote servers. It offers a user-friendly operating system and works in YAML language. No specialized software installations are required with Ansible. The purpose of Ansible is a quick and easy setup for SaaS users.

24.  Chef‍

Chef uses Ruby, and automatically manages configuration by translating infrastructure into code. It’s an open-source platform.

25.  Puppet‍

Puppet lets you dictate the end game for the systems you develop and maintain. It uses automated processes to manage server configuration long term.

26.  SaltStack‍

SaltStack is sometimes called simply “Salt”. It uses a central storage system to supply or modify servers or install new software. It operates in physical, digital, and cloud interfaces.

Conclusion

Throughout this guide, we talked about DevOps, what they are, and why SaaS companies use them. We also covered a variety of benefits, including:

• Reporting and feedback
• Compliance
• Collaboration
• CI/CD
• Faster building, testing, and deployment

As you consider the various DevOps tools available, consider features such as:

• Scalability
• Integration ability
• Vendor support
• Security
• Cost
• Automation ability
• Ease of use

Hopefully, this guide has shed some light on the advantages of DevOps automation tools and how they might benefit your business.

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