DevOps monitoring provides a thorough and up-to-date picture of the production environment’s condition and details on its services, infrastructure and applications. By gathering data from logs and metrics, you may monitor compliance and performance at every step of the software development lifecycle.
Monitoring isn’t just for production issues. It encompasses several procedures, such as planning, development, testing, deployment and operation.
A Roundup of Monitoring Types
The uses of continuous monitoring expand along with the size of businesses’ technological stacks. Many companies begin by tracking fundamental metrics, such as CPU utilization or customer behavior.
Infrastructure monitoring: You can gather and analyze data from your organization’s internal IT infrastructure and use that information to improve performance or other metrics. Some items to monitor are networks, servers, computer hardware and software, data centers, operating systems and storage. Common infrastructure monitoring tools include SolarWinds, ManageEngine, and Prometheus.
Network monitoring: Network monitoring focuses on finding errors, gauging components’ effectiveness and enhancing their usefulness. Everything on the network is monitored, including firewalls, servers, virtual machines and routers. A dynamic network monitoring system can help avert errors and outages that could harm performance. A few well-known utilities are Spiceworks, Cacti and Wireshark.
Application performance monitoring (APM): Is the software running fast enough? If not, where does the problem originate? You can obtain runtime metrics about an application’s performance, such as application uptime, security and log monitoring. APM solutions such as DataDog, Uptrends and Splunk are common tools for exploring many types of information, including API replies, backend application health, transaction volume and time metrics.
Cost monitoring: The DevOps pipeline entails many elements, each of which could be expensive. Any organization that wants to control costs – that’s everyone, right? – suggests that continuous monitoring of resource utilization is an essential need. These indicators help predict the overall cost and maximize resource use throughout DevOps stages.
Why DevOps Monitoring Matters
Since DevOps monitoring is proactive, it finds opportunities and gaps to enhance application performance before defects’ symptoms become apparent. By emphasizing potential areas for automation, monitoring further enhances the DevOps toolchain. With the aid of API-driven code, proper system monitoring offers insightful information that lets you see every element of your application stack. The monitoring process is enhanced when code hooks are incorporated into the application logic.
Automation: Enhancing communication between the development and operations teams is the central tenet of DevOps. However, coordination across teams may come to a standstill if there is a shortage of connectivity between the tools. Therefore, you can track commits and pull requests to keep track of Jira issues and alert the development team on its preferred communication channel, or you can use automation to enable a unified view of the complete development pipeline.
Visibility and transparency: A workflow has thousands of moving elements, each of which works at a different size and experiences varying latency and redundancy due to the introduction of micro-services and micro frontends. CI/CD allows developers to make frequent changes to their code, which adds to the complexity of a production system. Consequently, teams need ecosystem insight to repair any harm to the user experience as soon as it occurs.
Quality experience: A DevOps team that employs continuous monitoring technologies to manage its systems can minimize system downtime and business disruptions. This raises the bar for the quality of IT experience for internal and external stakeholders, such as staff members, business partners and clients. It optimizes business performance over time in every department of the company.
Doing DevOps Monitoring Right
Every organization has slightly different habits. Nonetheless, there are a few universally applicable principles.
Set clear goals: What is the overall goal of the DevOps monitoring implementation? Is it to improve system performance, address issues or enhance the user experience? Identifying these objectives helps you relate your monitoring goals to your targeted outcomes.
Select the correct monitoring tools: The DevOps team should consider some variables, including support for common monitoring tasks, scalability, user-friendliness and integration. Make sure they can adjust to the shifting needs of your DevOps workflows.
Gather suitable data: Concentrate on gathering and evaluating critical metrics. Steer clear of massive data volumes. Not all data is valuable, and having too much information might confuse. The DevOps team should rank these metrics according to how they directly affect the objectives. Doing so leads to better security, lower error rates, quicker response times and better resource usage.
Document everything: If you are serious about a culture of collaboration, properly document your monitoring procedures and encourage knowledge sharing among teams. This strategy promotes team members’ accountability and ownership of the monitoring procedures and activities.
Continuously review results: Ongoing analysis and improvement should be part of the process. Assess your monitoring plan to make sure it is adaptable and aligns with your goals. Use the data insights and user input to refine your monitoring methods.
A Few Sample Use Cases for DevOps Monitoring
Without a doubt, DevOps monitoring has several advantages for any business. But its appropriate use is necessary for its total success. Here are some of the use cases for DevOps monitoring.
Monitoring Git Workflows: Codebase conflicts can arise when numerous developers are working on the same project. Git can resolve these issues by utilizing rollbacks and commits. The Git process monitors these conflicts and maintains continuous development.
Code Instrumentation: The process of adding code to a program to track its performance and functionality is known as code instrumentation. Observing contextual values and monitoring stack calls are essential. DevOps processes can be evaluated for effectiveness and flaws. In this situation, testing and bug identification are critical factors.
Continuous Integration and Deployment Logs: Doing so facilitates troubleshooting failed deployments and allows for the resolution of difficulties. Consult the log files generated by continuous integration systems, especially their warnings and errors, and the continuous deployment logs to monitor the general health of the development pipeline.
Final Thoughts
As DevOps-managed services evolve quickly, so should monitoring solutions, given the increasing complexity and depth of software development. Making an informed decision regarding your development projects may require you to choose the best monitoring system that comprehends the numerous parts of an application and how they interact. Hiring competent service providers is therefore advised to guarantee you take the right action at the right time to gain the maximum return on investment.
