The DevOps methodology has been widely used by businesses to improve the continuous delivery and integration process. One of the main features of DevOps is to automate the process that falls within the DevOps pipeline. Automation has improved the overall effectiveness of the business working. However, the main challenge occurs when we have to maintain and monitor these automated pipelines. You have to keep an eye on what is going on within the business and as the network expands, this task becomes crucial. As the business grows, you should have full visibility of the system, especially when you have fewer resources to maintain the work at your disposal. Thus, there is an immense need to have a proper alerting system that will send alerts about any unexpected behavior of the system or application.
Whether your business is small or large, you need to consider various aspects of monitoring like what part should be monitored, what type of tools you can use, and how the monitoring strategy should be implemented. You can take the help of various automated monitoring tools to identify the potential issues. With software development, the monitoring tools and their functioning has also evolved. As the DevOps methodology is gaining popularity, you need to monitor each DevOps phase from integration, provisioning, to deployment.
DevOps team can use DevOps strategies for monitoring the system’s aspect. In this article, we will discuss various monitoring and alerting strategies that should be used for a seamless and effective delivery process.
What to Monitor?
To ensure the better performance of the system, you need to monitor various things. But first, you need to be sure what things you need to monitor within your system and to what level to ensure effective functioning of the system. Here, we have mentioned some of the categories that need deep monitoring:
1. Monitoring Server Health
You need to monitor the health of the server to ensure enhanced performance and uptime by optimal consumption of the available resources. The DevOps team needs to configure its resources efficiently to identify the critical endpoints within the application. Also, make sure that the applied configurations are compatible with the system to work seamlessly.
2. Monitoring the Output of an Application
One of the major aspects of DevOps that needs to be monitored is logging the output of an application which is mostly ignored. You must implement a centralized logging system that will help in checking for the potential errors within the system. Make sure that you use the right tools and strategies to throw an alert for occurring certain errors in real-time for preventing the system from vulnerabilities. These logs are used by the IT teams and system administrators to troubleshoot the expected errors and identify the root cause for a quick resolution.
3. Development Milestones
After implementing the DevOps methodology, you need to keep track of how well the DevOps strategy is working and getting better workflow insights. It allows you to monitor how well the different teams are collaborating. You should also keep a check on the sprint durations, error identification rate, resolve rate, and other features for improving the system’s performance. Keeping proper checks in place will help you in achieving the tasks’ deadlines.
4. Monitoring User Activity
Various types of users are using your software and any unusual behavior of the user may hinder your software’s performance. So, you need to check every user’s accounts and make sure they are protected with proper authentication methods and have the right role-based access to different applications. Also, you need to keep an eye on what is being accessed by which user to ensure safety.
How to Choose the Right Monitoring Tools?
There are many monitoring tools available. However, while choosing the right tool, you should select the one that is efficient in gathering the right metrics about the system’s performance and time-series data from multiple sources. Also, the tool should be capable of tracking the applications for various alerts and collecting data in databases.
Various tools come with different sets of functionalities, but only the right one will be able to solve your purpose of implementing a proper monitoring strategy in place. Here, we have mentioned below some of the functionalities that you might consider:
1. Dashboards
The chosen monitoring tool must provide an interactive user dashboard for getting real-time insights into your applications. It should be convenient for every user to use and work on the tool to analyze what is going on within the system.
2. Diagnosis
The tool should be able to look for the critical endpoints for potential vulnerabilities within the system. You will get to know that all your applications are working as expected.
3. Data collector
You should be provided with an open-source agent that provides the required support for the programming language to collect the data.
4. Data retention
The tool should allow you to collect the real-time time-series performance of the data and log that data.
5. Notifications
The monitoring tools should be well-incorporated with an easy notification system that will throw the right alerts about the tasks and latest updates.
6. Reports
Using the monitoring tool should help you to report all the running tasks, activities, and insights to enhance the performance.
Optimizing your Monitoring and Alerting Strategy
Once you start working on a monitoring strategy using the required tools, you must be able to optimize your strategy efficiently. The monitoring process comes with a standard procedure and will consume time with repeated manual work. It is recommended and preferred that you automate the monitoring tasks for getting regular updates.
You can also set alerts to get desired notifications, generate reports and the required notifications that need to be sent across the system. Automating everything will optimize the monitoring process and reduce the manual work to get insight into the system’s performance and speed.
Set your Monitoring and Alerting Priority
First, check for the critical and most important applications, services, and tasks involved within your system. Once you understand the priority of these applications and tasks, you can fix which task should be run first and what type of notification should be generated in the first place. Suppose you are running small deployments, and at the same time, both your server and code get compromised. What will you do and what will you prioritize first? Thus you set the priority for the alerting system to send you a notification about the critical situation instantly so that the required team identifies the root cause and fix that issue without any system breakdown.
Setting the priority will be beneficial for the IT team as they will be notified about the critical issues soon. This will allow the IT team to respond instantly and provide better customer service.
Monitoring the Application Stack
The monitoring tool should be capable of monitoring the complete stack providing a faster troubleshooting process. The tool must provide the below-mentioned feature set in the application.
1. Infrastructure monitoring
It should focus on the monitoring of the availability of the system’s resources like CPU usage, disk usage, uptime, response time, database, storage capacity, performance, security, network switches, server load, etc.
2. Performance monitoring
It should monitor your SLAs, browser speed, end-user transactions, throughput, error rate, page loads, etc.
3. Network monitoring
It should monitor your network packet flow, bandwidth, latency, network topology, etc.
Conclusion
Automation is one of the salient features of DevOps methodology. It helps in automating various manual tasks that will help in improving the performance and productivity of the team. But this automated pipeline needs to be monitored well to get a better insight into your system. It will keep you updated with the right alert at the right time. Thus, you can use the monitoring tools to manage various tasks simultaneously. You can automate the monitoring tasks to save your time and efforts by checking the system again and again for the same thing. With the right monitoring tool, you will get the complete report so that there is no need to go to every application for health checks.