My Toolbox

I've used a lot of great tools in my career, and this is not an exhaustive list. Unfortunately, I cannot list every tool that I have used. This is a very short list of some of my favorites.

I've been using Linux as my preferred OS for quite a while. I've earned certifications as an RCHE twice. Although I'm comfortable working with any Linux distribution, my preferred distributions are Fedora and XUbuntu. Linux is basically the foundation for the majority of the work that I do. Lately, I've been tinkering with Raspbian running on a Raspberry Pi 4.

Git is a foundation DevOps tool. It is a great tool for pulling down the latest version of many common apps during the initial build phase. I'm also very familiar with GitLab, GitHub, and BitBucket, which are all common cloud versions of the famous command line too. I use Gitea in my personal lab environment.

I have experience with Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and Terraform, but SaltStack is my favorite automation platform. It works across a wide variety of platforms, and it works well in Windows environments, which are often overlooked in DevOps environments. I've had very successful results in setting up Salt Open for a deployment, configuration management, and auditing and reporting tool. I'm also a SaltStack Certified Engineer.

While the ELK stack is a very powerful tool set, I much prefer Graylog. For most organizations, the simplified UI is the quickest and most manageable path to visualizing the incoming log data. Graylog utilizes the Elasticsearch engine on the back end. It is a great option for organizations that do not have the budget for Splunk.

Prometheus is another one of my favorite open source monitoring and alerting tools. It is oriented towards time series data, and it has integrations with alerting and visualization tools. As great as AppDynamics and DataDog are, not everyone has the budget for those tools.  Of course, Nagios and Icinga are excellent tools for general purpose service and connectivity monitoring.

I really like several tools in the Atlassian stable. Jira and Confluence are common in many corporate environments.  My favorite Atlassian tool is OpsGenie, which I've been using before it was part of Atlassian. OpsGenie is a cloud-based incident management tool that provides integrations to many DevOps tools. The OpsGenie documentation is excellent, and the ramp up time from first login to full production is very short.

Combodo ITOP is an open source ITSM application that works well for SMBs that want to use ITIL based processes. This web-based app provides incident, problem, request, and change management with simple CMBD. ITOP supports AD authentication, which makes it easy to integrate into corporate environments. I also like the ability to create custom approval workflows based on the related service category.

While I'm very comfortable with Perl, PHP, and shell scripting, I have been developing my Python skills. Python is a popular development language, and many of the tools that I use, like Salt, are developed with Python. In the past I would have used Perl for scripting or build an integration. Now I'm using Python as my first choice. I have converted some of my personal tools from Perl to Python.

As I mentioned earlier, this is not an exhaustive list. This page would be very long if I mentioned very open source app, database, and tool that I have deployed and supported.