Today at DevOpsDays Göteborg we rounded out the day’s events with an Open Space session on Cool Tools. Basically I wanted to have a session where as experts in our field we can suggest life-saving, life-changing or just handy tools we use from day to day that others may not be aware of. Each person got up, said some small amount about the tool in question and wrote it on the board. In the end we had a board full of suggestions and used up all the time!

So in the interests of posterity here is the list:

• Graphite – metrics
• RVM – Ruby Gem versioning
• rbenv – Ruby Gem versioning
• Maatkit/Percona-toolkit – DB Toolkit
• Soasta Cloudtest – Load testing
• Sahara – Vagrant sandboxing/snapshotting
• collectd – metrics
• git-subtree – Git add-ons
• ksar – graphical sar
• ngrep – network packet grep
• tcpflow – TCP flow recorder
• ack-grep – grep replacement
• keepass* – password store
• statsite – statistics server
• notmuch/mutt-notmuch – mail indexer/search
• sup-mail – mutt on steroids
• charles – http dumper
• gx – smart git pull and other tools
• ItsAllText! – textarea editing with external programme in firefox
• vimdiff – side-by-side diff in vim
• meld – UI-based diff/merge tool
• nvALT – searchable snippet editor
• bash-it – community bash configs
• pandoc – markup format convertor
• gitflow – git extensions
• etckeeper – config SCM
• Hg Mq – mercurial patch management
• ReviewBoard – peer review tool
• gerrit – peer review tool for git
• Beetil – ITIL tracker
• xperf/symchk – profiling on Windows
• oprofile – system profiling for Linux
• perftools.rb – Ruby profiling
• eatmydata – transparently disable fsyncs
• MMS – MongoDB monitoring service
• VPN-Cubed – inter-cloud-domain VPN
• jclouds/Deltacloud/Libcloud/fog – cloud abstraction APIs
• mtr – matt’s traceroute
• gltail – log visualisation
• varnishreplay – cache warming / http testing
• conntrack-tools – firewall HA tools

So there you have it. Please let me know if any of the URLs are wrong, and I hope some of these links help you in some way!