DevOps monitoring is a constantly evolving activity that is only expected to grow. With the DevOps market alone expected to approach $20 billion by 2026, there will be a continued need for enterprise-wide management and enhancement of DevOps methods.
With more companies embracing the speed and agility of DevOps, cybersecurity continuous monitoring is becoming more vital than ever. Despite this, many companies overlook continuous monitoring in favor of other DevOps lifecycle components.
Continuous monitoring is essential to preserving the overall health and functionality of the business’s IT infrastructure. Continuous monitoring’s main objective is to help companies identify possible problems early on so that DevOps teams can address them before a security breach happens.
What Does DevOps Monitoring Mean?
In DevOps, monitoring encompasses various procedures, such as planning, developing, testing, deploying, and operating. It provides a thorough and up-to-date picture of the production environment’s condition and details on services, infrastructure, and applications. You may monitor compliance and performance at every step of the SDLC process by gathering data from logs and metrics.
Types of Monitoring in DevOps
The uses of continuous monitoring expand along with the size of the technological stacks that businesses use. Many companies begin by tracking fundamental metrics like CPU utilization or customer behavior with continuous monitoring software.
1. Infrastructure monitoring
IT infrastructure must be established and maintained by a company whose delivery of goods and services is dependent on information technology. This infrastructure includes networks, servers, computer hardware and software, data centers, and storage. You can gather and analyze data from the IT infrastructure by keeping an eye on it, and you can use that information to improve results. It is part of monitoring the network, hardware, software, and operating system. Tools for monitoring infrastructure include SolarWinds, ManageEngine, and Prometheus.
2. Network monitoring
Everything on the network is monitored, including firewalls, servers, virtual machines, routers, and more. Network monitoring focuses on finding errors, gauging these components’ effectiveness, and enhancing their usefulness.
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.
3. Application performing monitoring
You can obtain runtime metrics about an application’s performance, such as app uptime, security and log monitoring, and overall performance, by monitoring it.
APM solutions such as DataDog, Uptrends, and Splunk are often used to create many types of information, including API replies, backend application health, transaction volume and time metrics, and others. These metrics are given in graphics and statistics following an evaluation of the overall infrastructure and application performance.
4. Cost monitoring
Monitoring the cost of your operations is crucial because the DevOps pipeline entails numerous modifications that could be expensive. Since the cloud houses most infrastructure, controlling costs is essential for efficient corporate operations. Continuous monitoring of resource utilization is required for cost monitoring.
You can find precise expenses per unit and customer by using a variety of cost-monitoring metrics for that purpose. By using these indicators, you can predict the overall cost and maximize resource use throughout different DevOps stages.
Why is DevOps Monitoring Essential?
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.
Since DevOps monitoring is by its very nature proactive, it finds opportunities and gaps to enhance application performance before symptoms of defects become apparent. By emphasizing potential areas for automation, monitoring further enhances the DevOps toolchain. Here are some of the benefits of DevOps monitoring.
1. Automation
Enhancing communication between the development and operations teams is the central tenet of DevOps. Coordination across teams, however, 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 their preferred communication channel, or you can use automation to enable a unified view of the complete development pipeline.
2. Visibility and transparency
CI/CD allows developers to make frequent changes to their code, which adds to the complexity of a production system. A workflow now 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. Consequently, teams need ecosystem insight to repair any harm to the user experience as soon as it occurs.
3. Quality experience
Minimizing system downtime and business disruptions is possible for a DevOps team that employs continuous monitoring technologies to manage their systems.
For internal and external stakeholders, such as staff members, business partners, and clients, this raises the bar for the quality of IT experience. It optimizes business performance over time in every department of the company.
Best Practices for DevOps Monitoring
Every organization will have slightly different habits that are regarded as best practices when it comes to continuous monitoring. Nonetheless, there are a few universally applicable principles.
1. Set clear goals
Selecting goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial to ensuring proper DevOps monitoring deployment. 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 will help you relate your monitoring goals to your targeted outcomes.
2. Selecting the correct monitoring tools
Organizations that use DevOps monitoring should carefully examine which monitoring solutions to deploy. You must choose the tool that helps you accomplish your needs, goals, and technology configuration.
The teams should consider some variables, including support for various monitoring tasks, scalability, user-friendliness, and integration capabilities. You can test these tools before integrating them to make sure they can adjust to the shifting needs of your DevOps workflows.
3. Gather suitable data
It’s critical to concentrate on gathering and evaluating critical metrics to steer clear of massive data volumes. Not all data is valuable, and having too much information might confuse.
The teams can rank these metrics according to how they directly affect the objectives. It will lead to better security, lower error rates, quicker response times, and better resource usage.
4. Documentation
Establishing a culture of collaboration can be facilitated by properly documenting monitoring procedures and encouraging knowledge sharing among teams.
This strategy promotes team members’ accountability and ownership of the monitoring procedures and activities. It can give efficiency and streamlining to any tool or incident response process.
5. Continuous review
Monitoring for DevOps typically entails ongoing analysis and improvement. You must assess your monitoring plan to make sure it is in line with your goals and adaptable. The data insights and user input can be used to refine your monitoring methods, so consider them and work closely on them.
Use Cases for DevOps Monitoring
Without a doubt, DevOps monitoring has several advantages for any kind of business. But its appropriate use is necessary for its total success. Here are some of the use cases for DevOps monitoring.
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Continuous Integration and Deployment Logs
Monitoring the CI/CD pipeline is critical for maintaining a healthy system. In general, CI logs contain warnings and errors. In addition, the general health of the development pipeline is monitored by CD logs. It facilitates troubleshooting failed deployments and allows for the resolution of difficulties.
Final Thoughts
As DevOps consulting 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.