5 Best Monitoring Practices to Efficiently Use DevOps

As organizations continue to adopt DevOps practices, monitoring is one of the most important components that they intend to improve. Monitoring needs to be done at all stages of the development lifecycle in order to save time, money, and reduce stress as a result. The proactive approach to monitoring the software development cycle is crucial in minimizing unwarranted downtimes of your application. However, an interruption-driven approach could be inevitable in some instances of unforeseeable challenges and errors.

The continuous delivery (CD) mechanism is structured so that the red flags can be identified sooner, creating scope for fixing them before they could develop into a full-blown problem. The performance of a service-level agreement (SLA) also becomes simplified with the prospects offered by continuously monitoring the systems and the entire development process, while significantly reducing the change failure rate (CFR).

Infrastructure Monitoring

Monitoring as a process involves collecting, analyzing, and acting on data. Monitoring is integral to the DevOps cycle and helps you achieve CI & CD. To do this right, you need to have a solid understanding of what your system looks like at any given moment. This means monitoring metrics like CPU usage and memory utilization (on cloud-based systems). You also need to ensure that they’re collected in real time so they can be analyzed immediately after being generated.

The benefits of effective infrastructure monitoring practices are evident. They keep your systems running smoothly while saving you time and money in the long run. The annual financial cost of network downtime due to brownouts ranged from $250,000 to $700,000 in losses, with an average cost of $600,000 per organization. The traditionally massive requirements of IT infrastructure can now be covered by adopting Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) to provision servers automatically.

Performance & Availability Monitoring

Monitoring is a vital part of any DevOps program and should be included in your initial strategy. Monitoring is the process of collecting data from IT infrastructure and applications, analyzing it, and providing insights on performance and availability. Monitoring helps you gain visibility into your current environment so that you can understand what’s happening on your servers at any point in time. This enables faster problem isolation, faster issue resolution, quicker service delivery, and more efficient operations overall; all of which are key to DevOps success.

When monitoring is integrated into software development activities, it becomes a continuous feedback loop that gives developers insight into how changes impact application performance before they go live. CFR is a DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metric of software development stability. It measures the change percentage that is responsible for service degradation, which can be as high as 65% for low-performing teams. The practice helps organizations learn about changes early on so they can make informed decisions about when to make them or not. They can improve lead times without negatively impacting customers’ experience with the system or increasing costs. Elite DevOps teams have registered 6570x faster recovery times as compared to low performers which also helps reduce CFR to sub 5%.

High Granularity Data Collection

This is the most critical aspect of DevOps monitoring. High-granularity data provides a more accurate picture of how your product is performing. For example, if you’re using a web server that can handle 100 requests per second (RPS), but you only receive 50 RPS from your users during a test period, then something’s wrong. You need to investigate why users aren’t hitting those other 50 RPS and figure out what needs to be fixed in order for them to reach your target number of RPS. Once you’ve identified where there’s an issue with high-granularity data collection, it’s time to fix your monitoring processes.

Divide & Conquer (Breaking Down Existing Silos with the Help of Metrics)

DevOps is all about collaboration and communication, making metrics and monitoring a key component of the process. Metrics can help you better understand what’s happening in your system, who is using your product, and how they’re using it. They can very well be used to break down silos between teams that have traditionally worked separately.

Customer experience in the financial industry is often the defining factor for the organization’s flourishing in these digital times. Keeping up with market trends requires rapid development and continuous improvement, and incorporating those trends into systems is critical to success. The need to overhaul legacy banking infrastructure also stems from the realization of quality, risk-free applications, and compliance strategies. Dedicated teams working cross-functionally to improve different aspects of the comprehensive development funnel are most heightened in the disruptive Fintech industry.

Use Continuous Monitoring (CM) to Ensure CI & CD

Continuous monitoring is a crucial practice for DevOps. It’s important to use it to ensure CI & CD and make sure you’re on the right path. Some of the benefits of using CM include providing quality, refactoring and optimizing code, identifying bugs early, creating detailed logs that can be used for debugging, and reducing downtime due to hardware failure or resource failure (such as an inability to scale your app).

Continuous monitoring can help you monitor whether a build has passed all tests successfully before deploying it into production; it can also check if there are any errors in output if something goes wrong. You should also check if any relevant changes have been made since deployment. This will help identify why something went wrong so that you can fix it quickly without having people suffer from downtime. Other obstacles to the smooth running of a business—such as unavailability of applications/services at any time during regular operations hours (usually 8 am–5 pm) can also be resolved similarly.

Monitoring is crucial to your entire development lifecycle

Monitoring is an essential part of DevOps and can be used to improve the quality of the software. Monitoring can also help you identify problems and bottlenecks, as well as security issues that are not otherwise apparent. By monitoring your system throughout its life cycle (development, testing, and production), it’s possible for everyone involved in a project, from developers to testers to users themselves—to get insights into how well everything is working together at any given time.

As you can see, monitoring is essential. Although the benefits may not be readily apparent, monitoring your software applications and infrastructure in a continuous way will make your work easier, save you money, and prevent last-minute stress.

The above five best practices should help you get started on the right track. To get expert assistance from our team to help you monitor your systems for continuous development, talk to us today!