After the rush of Day 1, when your environments launch, operations change a bit.
Attention shifts from active development of infrastructure to the mundane art of keeping it alive, healthy, and working smoothly. It’s time for monitoring your environments, making adjustments for better performance, and just regular maintenance—or what’s collectively called Day 2 operations.
This part of the cloud operations lifecycle is often considered tedious and dull. While Day 2 operations are critical to effective software development pipelines, they involve a lot of repetitive actions, such as monitoring metrics, tinkering with configurations and cloud infrastructure, and other monotonous cloud operations tasks.
Luckily, automation can take over a lot of this burden, saving you time and effort, while freeing you up to attend to other tasks. Today, we’d like to share a list of tools that will come in handy, for automating Day 2 operations.
Top Day 2 operations tools for 2025
Ansible
Ansible is one of the most popular configuration management tools for handling many recurring infrastructure tasks. It’s quite simple, yet powerful. It has a low learning curve, a human-readable syntax, and a huge community around it. Ansible tasks, collected into roles, combine to form what are known as playbooks configuration management. Playbooks are quick to write, able to be templated according to your needs, and launched on multiple hosts at the same time.
If you’re in need of a quick and easy solution for the most basic Day 2 operations, you’ll find Ansible very tempting. Considering its widespread adoption, playbooks for the tasks you need to perform might already be available on its code sharing platform, ready for use.
In terms of disadvantages, Ansible unfortunately doesn’t include any graphical interface for creating playbooks, which restricts usage to those with expertise in configuration management. Ansible also lacks native role-based access controls scheduling mechanisms out of the box in its open-source variant. In addition, it isn’t the fastest. This isn’t a huge issue if you’re managing a few hosts, but it becomes quite noticeable with bigger inventories that involve hundreds or thousands of nodes.
SaltStack
SaltStack is a popular Ansible alternative. It’s much more sophisticated, relying on ZeroMQ queue-based communication between the master instance and agents installed on managed hosts by default. However, it makes up for this spike in complexity with excellent scalability, significant performance improvement, and unmatched capabilities.
For example, SaltStack has the ability to codify reactions to events happening on remote hosts. Moreover, you can schedule Salt executions both on the control server and on the nodes. It also has a granular permission control system.
This all makes SaltStack perfect for managing Day 2 operations for enterprise-class projects, with multiple big, bulky environments consisting of dozens or hundreds of nodes, where extensive feature set, time, precision, and high scalability are more important than ease of use.
Unfortunately, documentation for this tool, just as the tool itself, is much more complex. Some task definitions for SaltStack, called formulas, are available to download from the officially curated source; however there’s much less to choose from than with Ansible. It’s a great choice, but one for experienced operators.
Puppet
Puppet is an agent-based, declarative automation tool. It’s often considered a competitor to Ansible and SaltStack, although it focuses on a very specific niche:state-based configurations.
It’s not as great for ad-hoc tasks, but it excels at keeping track of your desired configuration, and periodically making sure the hosts it manages stay aligned with that configuration. In essence, it’s not meant for quick, on-demand actions, but for continuous automation. It’s very useful for cases such as compliance enforcement, or dealing with after-launch configuration drift.
In stark contrast to its rivals, Puppet doesn’t rely solely on YAML, opting instead for its own language based on Ruby, called Puppet DSL (domain-specific language). While that significantly affects the learning curve for Puppet, it also provides a lot of sophisticated capabilities, better flexibility, and more customization options. Its library of publicly available modules, called Puppet Forge, boasts over 7,500 well-cataloged entries, accumulated thanks to its longevity, and the dedication of its open-source community.
DataDog and New Relic
Representing the most popular choices in SaaS monitoring solutions, both DataDog and New Relic provide extensive observability capabilities. They’re excellent for alerting, log gathering and analysis, as well as uptime and performance monitoring for your environments.
Packed with features, both of these tools offer great ways to look out for your infrastructure in the long term. They’re both remotely hosted, quick and easy to set up, with a lot of integrations seamlessly working out of the box. Note that you’ll need to have the budget to accommodate their pricing.
Prometheus and Grafana OSS
Prometheus combined with Grafana is a decent open-source alternative to commercial solutions. Although they’re not exactly as comprehensive, it’s still a solid observability window into your infrastructure at little to no cost.
This tandem solution might be a good choice for simpler use cases, such as collecting basic information from multiple small environments in one place. It’s also suitable for basic alerting and information sharing capabilities, or if you require a self-hosted solution. Just keep in mind this tandem solution takes a bit of effort to set up, so it may not be the right choice for beginners.
CI/CD pipelines (such as GitHub Actions or GitLab Pipelines)
Day 2 operations are supposed to begin after infrastructure development is finished. But with the widespread adoption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tooling and the popularity of GitOps methodology, CI/CD pipelines can be used to manage Day-2 infrastructure as well.
It’s a crude, but still somewhat useful, approach. Scheduled pipelines can be leveraged to accomplish a very basic set of Day-2 chores, depending on dedicated tools. For example, you can use them to re-run a Terraform plan operation daily, to make sure the provisioned host did not diverge from its original specification, or to automatically execute an Ansible playbook twice a day.
Pipelines can also be configured with manual job triggers, to provide operators with a self-service button for executing predefined tasks, such as restarting infrastructure. Despite not being a complete solution per se, they might be a good starting point for further automation, or a useful enhancement for an already capable toolkit.
Quali Torque’s Day 2 Operations Tools
Quali Torque is a platform engineering tool that automates the manual work involved in Day 2 operations. Supporting all the most popular cloud platforms, Infrastructure as Code tools, and Ansible, Torque is designed to automate the operation and integration between resources delivered by tools across the infrastructure lifecycle.
With Torque Workflows, you can define and automate Day 2 actions as code, which can be repeatedly executed either by a single click of your operator, or on a cron-based schedule. That eliminates the complexity and manual interactions required for routine maintenance.
Torque Workflows can use custom events to execute tasks. That allows you to pre-emptively schedule tasks such as terminating environments after a period of inactivity, or automatically scale the infrastructure in response to growing demand, saving both infrastructure costs and time.
Torque also provides visibility into otherwise complex ad-hoc infrastructure code updates: you can map any infrastructure-as-code files to active or inactive environments, as well as blueprints for environments that rely on them. This allows users to anticipate downstream impacts before pushing code updates for infrastructure that other teams may rely on.
If you’re concerned about the enforcement status of your Day 2 workflows, Torque tracks their execution, including details such as the resources affected, whether the workflow was executed successfully, and the user who executed it. This enables DevOps teams to diagnose and resolve issues faster and more easily.
To see how Torque supports Day 2 operations, watch this brief demo video:
Summary
The most dreaded parts of Day 2 operations are usually mundane, repeatable tasks. Luckily, thanks to automation, manually attending every container, machine, and environment is no longer an industry standard. Hopefully, with the tools from our curated list, you can change time-consuming and cumbersome work into quick, easy and effortless action.
If you’d like to learn more about Quali Torque, or the ways it can help you make your Day-2 operations more effective and cost-efficient, click here to request a free 30-day trial!