In a time-to-market oriented business, DevOps with its open and Agile attitude help organizations to deliver business value quicker, adapt to change easier and overcome IT complexity with collaboration and automation.
With Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD), developers ensure frequent delivery of the newer code to the production environment. However, to be successful with the CI/CD cycle, it is imperative to continuously monitor the test and production environment.
DevOps monitoring is the key to continuously analyze an application for errors so as to avoid risks, maintain compliance, and fix issues as soon as possible. DevOps monitoring can be done at six different levels:
1. Application Performance Monitoring
Application Performance Monitoring (APM): This is the process of monitoring the backend architecture of an application to resolve performance issues and bottlenecks on time. The APM methodology works in three phases:
Identifying the Problem: This phase involves proactively monitoring an application for issues before a problem actually occurs. For this, a number of tools are used to discover problems at the infrastructure and application level, which includes user experience monitoring, synthetic monitoring wherein the user interactions are synthesized to unveil the problems.
Isolating the Problem: Once the problems are identified, they must be isolated from the environment to ensure that they do not impact the entire environment.
Solving Problem by Diagnosing the Cause: Once the problem is detected and isolated, it is diagnosed at code-level to understand the cause of the problem and fix it.
2. Network Performance Monitoring
It's the practice of consistently checking a network for deficiencies or failure to ensure continued network performance. This may include monitoring network components such as servers, routers, firewalls, etc. If any of these components slows down or fails, network administrators are notified about the same, ensuring that any network outrage is avoided.
3. Infrastructure Monitoring
Infrastructure monitoring verifies availability of IT infra components in a data center or on cloud infrastructure (IaaS). This involves monitoring the resources, their availability, checking under-utilized and over-utilized resources to optimize IT infra and operational cost associated with it.
4. Database Performance Monitoring
By monitoring the database, it is possible to track performance, security, backup, file growth of the DB. The main goal of database monitoring is to examine how a DB server- both hardware and software are performing. This can include taking regular snapshots of performance indicators that help in determining the exact time at which a problem occurred. When DBAs can examine the time when a problem occurred, it's possible for them to figure out the possible reason for it as well.
5. API Monitoring
API monitoring is the practice of examining applications' APIs, usually in a production environment. It gives visibility of performance, availability, and functional correctness of APIs, which may include factors like the number of hits on an API, where an API is called from, how an API responds to the user request (time spent on executing a transaction), keep a track of poorly performing APIs, etc.
6. QA Monitoring
Quality Assurance includes activities that ensure that all processes, procedures, and standards of application development are in compliance. By writing test cases, QA monitoring can be automated, enabling the development team to ensure that they are on the right track and working as per the requirement.
ALSO READ: Dev-test-ops: Joining the Dots of DevOps and Testing
DevOps Monitoring: A Step Towards Seamless Application Performance
DevOps monitoring and its 6 components ensure on-time, error-free delivery of a project. Depending upon your application, its complexity, and scale, one or all monitoring components can be adopted.
For a number of projects that Daffodil has been working on currently, DevOps monitoring is playing a crucial role. To understand which monitoring component does your application needs, set up a DevOps consultation session with our DevOps expert, Gaurav Sharma.