DEVOPSdigest

How can businesses leverage DevOps monitoring to tap optimal DevOps potential?

Start with: What is DevOps Monitoring? - Part 1

DevOps Monitoring Use-Cases: Real Examples of How Enterprises Use Monitoring Tools

There's no question the DevOps monitoring tools enable your DevOps team to automate the monitoring processes across the software development lifecycle. The monitoring tools enable your DevOps teams to identify code errors early, run code operations efficiently, and respond to code changes in usage rapidly. However, one must implement monitoring tools effectively to ensure complete success. Here are some prominent DevOps monitoring use cases that you can leverage to achieve DevOps success:

1. Git Workflow Monitoring

DevOps teams often encounter recurring codebase conflicts as a result of multiple developers working on the same project functionality simultaneously. Git enables your DevOps teams to manage and resolve conflicts, including commits and rollbacks. So, when you monitor your Git workflows, you can easily keep the code conflicts and ensure consistent progress in your project.

2. Code Linting

Code linting tools help your DevOps team in analyzing the code for style, syntax, and potential issues. With these tools, your DevOps team can ensure that they are adhering to the coding best practices and standards. Code linting enables you to identify and address code issues before they trigger runtime errors and other potential performance issues. With linting tools, you can ensure that your code is clean and consistent.

3. Distributed Tracing

Your DevOps teams need distributed tracing to streamline the monitoring and debugging processes of the microservices applications. Distributed tracing helps your team in understanding how applications interact with each other through APIs, making it easier to identify and address application performance issues.

4. Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) Logs

With CI/CD pipelines becoming the prominent element of the DevOps ecosystem, monitoring them is imperative for DevOps success. The continuous integration (CI) logs help ensure that your code builds are running smoothly. Otherwise, the logs inform you about the errors or warnings in your code builds. So, monitoring the CI logs helps identify the potential issues in your build pipeline and address them proactively. Likewise, the continuous deployment (CD) logs inform you about the overall pipeline health and status. So, monitoring the CD logs helps your DevOps teams easily troubleshoot any failed deployments and repair potential issues.

5. Configuration Management Changelogs

Configuration management changelogs help DevOps teams to gain deep visibility into the system's health and important changes - both manual and automated. So, monitoring these logs empowers your team to track the changes made to the system, identify the unauthorized changes and rectify the issues.

6. Code Instrumentation

Code instrumentation is the process of adding code to an application. This process enables you to collect data about the application's performance and its operations route. This is crucial for tracing stack calls and knowing the contextual values. So, monitoring this code instrumentation results empowers you to measure the efficiency of your DevOps practices and gain visibility into the potential gaps, if any. It also helps you identify bugs and improve testing.

Best Practices to Nail DevOps Monitoring

Just like the adoption of DevOps itself, implementing a robust DevOps monitoring model needs a strategic combination of culture, process, and tooling. Though you can take inspiration from how your competitors are adopting DevOps monitoring, the right model you adopt must be on par with your unique organizational needs and SDLC. Here are some best practices that help you nail DevOps monitoring:

1. Know What to Monitor

Knowing what to monitor is half the battle won. So, even before you start implementing your DevOps monitoring strategy, it is crucial to know what needs to be monitored. Your monitoring objectives should focus on the server's performance, vulnerabilities, user activity, and application logs.

2. Define Development Goals

Your DevOps monitoring strategy must be anchored with fixed development goals. These objectives help you understand how well your DevOps monitoring strategy is performing. A most sought-after method to ensure meeting the objectives is to track each sprint duration and measure the time taken to identify, document, and rectify the issues. Leveraging machine learning technology to automate configuration processes helps you save significant time and avoid manual errors.

3. Monitor User Activity

Monitoring user activity is one of the most important monitoring types. It helps you in tracking unusual requests, multiple login attempts, logging from unknown devices, and any suspicious user activity like a developer trying to access the admin account. By monitoring user activity, you can ensure that the right user is accessing the right resources. This process helps in preventing potential threats to the system and mitigating cyberattacks.

4. Choose the Right Monitoring Tools

Selecting the right set of DevOps monitoring tools from a rich choice of tooling available in the DevOps ecosystem is an arduous task. Picking the precise tool that is most suitable for your SDLC and your application's infrastructure starts with an evaluation process. It primarily involves understanding the tool's features and functionality so you can easily assess whether it is best suited for application or infrastructure monitoring or not. So, here are some questions you need to ask to evaluate the DevOps monitoring tool:

■ Does the tool integrate easily? Ensure that the monitoring tool easily integrates with your DevOps pipeline and your broader technology stack. This helps you atomate actions and alerts with ease.

■ Does the tool offer something new? The DevOps monitoring tools that glean a rich amount of data are a cut above the rest. However, more data demands more attention, uses more storage, and needs more management. So, select monitoring tools that pave way for new avenues of monitoring, rather than those that provide normal benefits.

■ Does the tool offer a unified dashboard? Your DevOps ecosystem comprises many services, libraries, and products working together. So, a DevOps monitoring tool that offers a unified dashboard helps you gain complete, real-time visibility across the DevOps lifecycle and make it easier to identify issues and gaps.

■ Does the tool integrate alerts with your existing tooling? Your DevOps monitoring tools must enable your DevOps teams to respond quickly to alerts and notifications. Check whether the tool supports alerting directly or integrates with your existing notification tools. Also, ensure that the tooling you're evaluating integrates with your organization's existing reporting and analytics tools.

■ What type of audit logs does the tool provide? Understanding the current state of your system is important, especially when something goes south. The action-by-action record provided by the audit logs enables you to understand what has happened, identify which process or person is responsible, analyze the root cause, and provide a basis for learning the gaps in the system. So, what type of audit logs does your tool provide and how do they provide crucial information?

■ What are the tool's data storage needs? DevOps monitoring tools generate massive amounts of data. So, it is important to understand the storage needs of the tool and the cloud storage costs to keep useful history without storing data beyond its useful life.

■ What types of diagnostics does the tool offer? Check whether the monitoring tool alerts you to symptoms or helps you in diagnosing the underlying issue. Choose comprehensive tools, such as application performance monitoring platforms, to understand what's happening in complex scenarios such as several asynchronous microservices working together.

Wondering how to get started with DevOps Monitoring? Opsera can help!