Tool Reviews

Honest, in-depth reviews of infrastructure tools and platforms. Find the right tools for your enterprise needs.

Enterprise Tooling

Grafana

Open-source analytics and visualization platform for metrics, logs, and traces.

Pricing: Open Source free; Grafana Cloud from free tier; Enterprise pricing varies

Pros

  • + Extensive data source support
  • + Beautiful visualizations

Cons

  • - Dashboard sprawl risk
  • - Performance at scale
Enterprise Tooling

Kubernetes

Production-grade container orchestration for automating deployment, scaling, and management.

Pricing: Free, Open Source (Apache 2.0); Managed options vary by provider

Pros

  • + Industry standard
  • + Extensive ecosystem

Cons

  • - Operational complexity
  • - Learning curve
Enterprise Tooling

Prometheus

Open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for reliability and scalability.

Pricing: Free, Open Source (Apache 2.0)

Pros

  • + Powerful query language
  • + Excellent Kubernetes integration

Cons

  • - Requires separate long-term storage
  • - High cardinality challenges
Enterprise Tooling

Terraform

Infrastructure as Code tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.

Pricing: Open Source free; Terraform Cloud from $20/user/month

Pros

  • + Extensive provider ecosystem
  • + Clear plan/apply workflow

Cons

  • - Limited programming constructs
  • - State management complexity
Enterprise Tooling

ArgoCD

Declarative GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes.

Pricing: Free, Open Source (Apache 2.0)

Pros

  • + Pure GitOps model
  • + Excellent UI

Cons

  • - Kubernetes-only
  • - Secret management