Are you able to define „big”? Perhaps you know how much is “too much”? Or is “little” enough or not? If you cannot answer these questions than you are not alone! Probably no one can. If you are wondering why, I am going to show what to do so you are not lost.
One of the most important factors when you launch your service is the end user’s experience. All in all, these people pay for your services. You want their experience to be joyful, smooth and enjoyable. You do want them to come back!
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What is DevOps monitoring?
Have you ever been angry with a website that took ages to load? Probably yes. So if you provide your customers with web services you simply do not want them to wait. Research shows that a typical customer can wait up to three seconds before leaving. It is not long time…
DevOps monitoring means overseeing the entire development process of planning, development, integration and testing, deployment, and operations. If you are monitoring your service you might want to check the aforementioned load time. Usually “all green” means you are able to show the website in less than 3 seconds (you might have additional things downloading in the background but the user will not notice). If the time is longer (but not much more!) you should get warning. You might want to limit the time to 15-20 seconds. If it takes longer than sorry, you are offline. There are deviations from the rule, obviously. If you want to buy tickets for a music show or football match, together with 50 000 other fans, all at the same time, there is a high probability you will be queued and you will have to wait long minutes or even hours. But these are not everyday rule. In other words, monitoring helps to increase end-user and customer satisfaction.
So how to start monitoring your service? You might check availability on your own by pressing “Refresh” button but you will not be able to do it every few seconds, 24/7/365. That is when the monitoring teams and systems come into play.
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Monitoring system
First of all, you need to take care of a good monitoring strategy and quantify your needs. You need to give an answer to some basic questions such as “How long my customer can wait for the website to load?”. By giving answer do such questions you will be specifying KPIs – Key Performance Indicators. When the indicators are stated you are ready to go.
The whole monitoring system should be set up in such a way that it can identify an incident when it occurs. It is good to define an incident as a moment when the end user sees that something bad is happening, e.g., web store is not working and they get a blank or error page. Whenever possible, the system should try to repair itself. Thanks to such a setup, the issue will not be visible for a long time. On the other hand, if the automated procedure was not able to bring the service back to life than this is when a DevOps team comes into play and analyses the problem. You can choose if you prefer to start with the first line of support filled with, e.g., junior DevOps (or Network Operations Center’s Monitoring) Engineers or to transfer it directly to more senior personnel. It is a good practice to start with juniors since this is a great opportunity for them to learn and gain real life experience.
DevOps monitoring tools
Best practices in DevOps monitoring are complemented by advanced tools and monitoring software that will help you in your daily work. So, what are the different types of monitoring in DevOps, and which practices and tools are most effective? We differentiate between DevOps continuous monitoring tools, DevOps Monitoring Platforms, and network monitoring tools.
Top 10 DevOps Monitoring Tools:
- Sensu
- PagerDuty
- Datical Deployment Monitoring Console
- Tasktop Integration Hub
- Librato
- Prometheus
- Kibana
- Splunk
- Nagios
- Dynatrace
We can use it for infrastructure monitoring, service monitoring, software monitoring, and application monitoring.
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What is Continuous Monitoring in DevOps?
Continuous monitoring is designed to identify potential threats early and address them before they become a problem. Monitoring is the process of regularly and vigilantly checking systems, networks, and data for signs of performance degradation. Monitoring the health of the app allows DevOps teams to get better insight into its performance, security risks, and compliance issues across the entire DevOps pipeline.
If the issue is too challenging for the first line of support then the second line is being called in and they work together in order to correct the issue. If they still are unable to find a fix, then the third line gets involved – they can be developers. Usually, it gets corrected by then.
After heading off an incident, it is a good practice to perform small investigation in order to answer the main questions: What went wrong? and How can we prevent it from happening again? These questions are rarely answered by one person. More often it is a whole team (or teams!) who find best solutions and implement them
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Importance of DevOps monitoring – summary
A DevOps approach culture extends continuous monitoring into the staging, testing, and even development environments. There are numerous reasons for this. Quick and automatic responses to any changes and sudden errors are possible thanks to the DevOps monitoring solution which also allows for improving customer experience. In order for any problems to be detected and solved manually or automatically, it is worth taking care of the appropriate practices and tools throughout the entire software development process.
