What is DevOps Monitoring?
Tags: devops, productivity, discuss
Published: 2022-05-19 18:54:58

DevOps monitoring refers to the continuous process of identifying, planning, developing, testing, deploying, and reviewing feedback to prepare for potential threats facing systems, networks, or databases. This involves the viewing of important infrastructures in a production environment.  

In many ways, DevOps monitoring may be similar to monitoring any structured IT operations. However, DevOps monitoring analyzes the IT service or product deeper. It focuses on setting up reliable services and immediately testing its capabilities, usually in the production lifecycle. This is a form of proactive monitoring that emphasizes quality in the stages rather than reacting to a problem later. 

DevOps monitoring is also referred to as Continuous Monitoring (CM) or Continuous Control Monitoring (CCM) because it involves identifying any potential threats to the security of IT infrastructures in an automated manner.

In this article, we’ll look at why we need DevOps monitoring and use cases to explain the reasons. Then, we’ll look at the features you should consider when selecting a DevOps monitoring platform.

## Why DevOps Monitoring? 

Technological transformations happen regularly, and organizations need to address these changes in real-time. You may have system complexity and development efficiency concerns, which will only be solved by effective monitoring. 

These concerns may be:

•	_Our code needs to be written and updated regularly, but how do we maintain the same quality without introducing vulnerabilities?
•	Our system is so complex, and everything part has an important function. How do we monitor everything?
•	 Comparing my KPIs seems like an uphill task because the entire project is complex. How do I get to manage these problems?_

So, if you were to build a messaging-passing system, an automated system, or rollback protocols, looking to ship code faster and safely, monitoring is inevitable. It ensures the code is clean because of regular updates or fix bugs. 

Working as a team is an important attribute to attaining the desired success. But, this success would be attainable if they respond to problems quickly. Now, DevOps monitoring comes in to help teams to collaborate in conceptualizing the security of applications or systems from development stages to operations.

We’re now at a stage where technology is so advanced, and the conditions of applications change faster than the speed of request callbacks or Git commits. DevOps monitoring can help in the development of self-healing features to keep pace with the sudden changes.
  
Monitoring allows you to determine criteria for Key performance indicators (KPIs), like:

•	Failures experienced in deployment
•	Code errors
•	Mean-time-between- failures(MTBF)
•	Mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) errors
•	Pull request cycle time
•	Change failure rate

Customer satisfaction is a term mentioned in every meeting in an organization and can be an uphill task to actualize or achieve it. Monitoring offers you the desired insight into your project development process. 

## DevOps Monitoring Use Cases 

Monitoring is an important attribute and needs to be part of your development and deployment cycle. It helps you have a clear view of your applications or systems activities. But, it is not entirely why you need monitoring. 

Let’s cover some use case examples.

**Basic code linting**

Linters are necessary code tools that help style your code and identify bugs and errors. In many ways, linters help you find best practices for a coding standard. Therefore, if you incorporate a linter tool in your application, it will fix hidden or unidentified problems in your code before they cause runtime errors or other serious issues.

**Git workflow**

It is impossible to find any developer who has not done a Git commit. At a particular point in their coding life, they have attempted to work on a project resulting in code conflicts. With multiple features in Git, they can help developers resolve code-related conflicts, rollbacks, and commits. However, monitoring Git workflow ensures that the developers add commits consistently without affecting the project condition.

**Monitoring Continuous Integration (CI)logs**

Continuous Integration (CI) can help you analyze the condition of your code and ensure they are running smoothly. If there are numerous errors, they’ll require tools to troubleshoot or debug. Change is inevitable for software success. Monitoring your logs can help you identify potential threats with your software delivery or applications that need quick fixing.

**Monitoring Continuous Deployment (CD) logs**

It is important to monitor your Continuous Deployment (CD) logs to better understand the application’s status. In many cases, logs give out information about the application’s behavior. It is simple to fix failed deployments and threats by continuously monitoring the logs. 

**Monitoring configuration management change logs**

Configuration management change logs may help you know the current status of your system and which parts require changes. When you integrate a monitoring culture of these logs, you can track changes made to your applications or system and troubleshoot issues. The ultimate goal is to maintain the integrity of the system or application.

**Monitoring infrastructure deployment logs**

Deployment logs help identify any possible risks or failures and new stack builds. These logs are important in solving problems related to stack deployments and checking unauthorized changes that caused a runtime error of failure.  

**Code instrumentation**

Code instrumentation refers to the process of including code into your application or system to measure its performance and diagnose any issues. You can use instrumentation to see messages on logs in case of an application run time failure. If you can monitor code instrumentation outputs, you can identify areas that may need changes.

**Distributed tracing**
 
Distributed tracing is a method that DevOps and IT teams use to monitor microservices Applications. Usually, applications interact through APIs, which is significant for looking into when errors or failures occur. Distributed tracing helps you assess the performance of your application by observing service requests. 

**Application performance monitoring**

Application performance monitoring (APM) platforms help track the application’s performance. This process may include assessing response time, identifying errors, and tracking user experience. The overall goal of APM platforms is to identify and fix any small issues before they cause more problems to other parts of the system.

**Network monitoring**

Network monitoring is a procedural process by a computer network used to identify failing components before they cause other problems. For example, failing routers or overloaded servers can cause serious outages or network failures. With network flogs, it may be simple for you to identify suspicious activities.

**Synthetic monitoring**

Synthetic monitoring tests the performance and reliability of a system or some of its components. For instance, a client application can be installed in your device or application to test scripts on key areas offering you insights on areas that need improvement. 

## What to Look for In a Good DevOps Monitoring Platform?

When looking for DevOps monitoring, it should be able to integrate with your practices and workflow. This means the platform you select should allow your team collaborates effectively. 

Consider these capabilities:

•	**Easier instrumentation and code tracing:** Tracing is an important way of monitoring your application in its production state or while it is up and running. DevOps or developers would want to add a tool or debugging instrumentation to their application and receive informative messages about errors during development and deployment. 

•	**Graphical code analysis:** It is the process of analyzing computer software without actually running the software. It is necessary to analyze security vulnerabilities in the code that can adversely affect the entire system, which is why graphical or visual analysis codes like visual studio, code graph, or Splunk may help identify the problem quickly.

•	**Contextual information and dependency maps:** You should look for a monitoring platform that allows system continuity because serious issues can make it unusable or vulnerable to attacks. With a proper contextual information tool, you can manage your information carefully. 

•	**Integration with popular DevOps toolsets:** The monitoring platform should be able to integrate with popular toolsets like Git or TravisCI. DevOps itself is a set of practices that involves using software and IT operations to have a simple workflow and have quality results. Monitoring tools will make it easy for organizations and teams to yield better results.

•	**Ability to capture, index, analyze, and correlate cloud and on-premise logs, metrics, traces, and events:**  When looking or selecting the best DevOps monitoring solution, it should have the ability to analyze, index, capture, trace, provide metrics, and capture events. This means the tool must allow you to capture these actions in a single dashboard.

•	**Data availability:**Look for a monitoring tool to provide real-time data for the teams to identify performance issues. It should link back with an API call or a line function to access real-time data of end-user experience.

•	**Integration with popular communication channels:** An integrated communication strategy is the connectivity that allows sharing of information consistently across all channels and aligns with teams’ objectives. A good monitoring platform should have the ability to send alerts to teams in case to reduce downtime or sharing of reports. 

•	**Automation:** You should consider a tool that can improve your existing automation mechanism without streamlining your development process or causing downtime. In most cases, DevOps teams always want to automate clusters, nodes, and pods to make the deployment process scalable. This means your choice of monitoring platform should be able to fit all these needs.

## Conclusion 

DevOps practices have changed how we manage our systems development cycles and create a continuous delivery quality software environment. It is all about understanding why you need to monitor and what platform will do the work to suit your needs and attain your desired success.

You should learn to incorporate these monitoring practices if you want to keep pace with technological advancements that bring all sorts of vulnerabilities affecting operations and customer satisfaction.