How to Integrate Continuous Monitoring in the DevOps Pipeline

How to Integrate Continuous Monitoring in the DevOps Pipeline

With evolving time, technology is advancing at a faster rate, where IT teams need to push their software upgrades quickly towards production level by beating their competitors. To acquire a swift response to such customer requirements, organizations must move to DevOps. It is extremely important for monitoring every phase of the DevOps pipeline and for identifying security issues that may obstruct the productivity of quality yield. Here comes the continuous monitoring in DevOps taking complete responsibility of looking at all the phases in the pipeline and monitoring through unexpected threats constantly.

What is Continuous Monitoring in DevOps all about?

Continuous monitoring in DevOps is an automated procedure that assists the DevOps teams in the early exposure of compliance issues that arise at distinct phases of DevOps processes. With many applications installed on the cloud expansion, IT security teams need to embrace several security software solutions to alleviate the security threats and at the same time maintain security and privacy. Continuous Monitoring in DevOps is not limited to DevOps only; it comprises any kind of area which needs complete focus. This offers the required data necessary to make assessments by allowing quick tracking and effortless error findings. It also offers feedback, thus letting the teams evaluate and take appropriate actions to resolve challenging areas. This can be attained easily by utilizing continuous monitoring tools which are adaptable across various situations, be it in the cloud, or on-premises, or around containerized ecosystems to view the systems frequently.

 

Objectives of Continuous Monitoring in DevOps

During the phase of the production release of software products, the Continuous Monitoring informs the quality analysts regarding any kind of issue arising in the production scenario. Therefore, continuous monitoring in DevOps assists the companies to track the operating performance of the product from close. This assists the teams to comprehend the results of the latest updates, the actual time data on the interactions of the users, and the user experience it has put overall. This statistic is also useful in the root-cause evaluation of that situation, and the state of IT infrastructure deployed software and offsite networks. There are three types of continuous monitoring in DevOps: infrastructure monitoring, application monitoring, and network monitoring.

 

How is the performance of DevOps measured?

According to the latest surveys, it is known that DevOps Research and Assessments [DORA] team identified four vital measures for the performance of DevOps. These four DevOps metrics cover mean lead time for changes, mean time to recover, deployment frequency, and change failure rate. When these metrics are tracked, the teams can have a good understanding of their DevOps challenges and take proper data-driven action towards them. These metrics are also associated with different DevOps attributes, including reliability, visibility, speed, and repeatability.

 

Learn about the Best Practices for Continuous Monitoring in DevOps

The organizations must consider what key features they require for monitoring based on their IT network. A few of the vital sectors to track include app performance, server strength, user behavior, system strengths and flaws, development goals, and much more.

  • Network tools need to monitor the multi-port metrics, security bandwidths, network lags, server bandwidth, network packet transfers, etc. carefully.

 

  • Application tools should monitor page loading speed, user interactions, user response time, browser speed, third-party application speed, SLA status.

 

  • Infrastructure tools need to reflect upon monitoring networks, storage, server and database health, security, user permissions, response time, performance trends, etc.

 

Learn how to implement Continuous Monitoring in DevOps

Strong and flexible solutions allow the technology teams to monitor the system glitches and offer metrics to take curative actions. Companies should follow the essential steps referred here to implement CCM properly.

  • Explain the possibility of applying CCM: Your organization should define which systems have to be monitored frequently and included under the reach of the IT management team.

 

  • Perform risk assessment: Your companies need to realize the significance of risk assessment. Its role is to detect those areas which are extremely exposed to risks that require more security controls.

 

  • Select a security control system: Once the risk assessment will provide the DevOps team with proper information to decide which areas need more focus, then the IT teams can execute security controls like antivirus, passwords, firewalls, encryption, etc. to safeguard the system.

 

  • Configuring monitoring tools: With the organizations beginning to configure the Continuous Monitoring tools, these monitoring tools start to secure the crucial security control data. These tools obtain the log files from the installed application, like the security threats and other functioning metrics.

 

  • Evaluating data: Eventually, it is the data that is evaluated to develop significant insights. Once data is gathered from various tools, it is utilized to interpret all the security and operational issues which need a resolution. Most organizations are evaluating huge data with big data analysis and AI to produce detailed reports, trends, and forms that imply any irregularities in the system.

 

Benefits of Continuous Monitoring in DevOps

Those IT companies who have embraced Continuous Monitoring are way ahead of their competitors. Continuous Monitoring assists in achieving vital information regarding IT applications, infrastructure, and networks. This allows keeping a close check on the critical data and information of the organization in actual time. The benefits of continuous monitoring in DevOps include –

  • Network precision
  • Decrease in system downtime
  • Quick incident response
  • Business performance catalyst

 

Implementation of Continuous Monitoring in DevOps

Strong and flexible solutions allow the technology teams for monitoring the system glitches and offer metrics to take curative actions. Companies can follow some general steps for implementing continuous monitoring in DevOps.

  • Identifying the scope of executing CCM: The organization needs to decide which are systems that require constant monitoring and also, they are included under the IT management team.
  • Act risk analysis: Companies should comprehend the significance of risk management where they can identify vulnerabilities.
  • Select a security control system: After checking on the risk factors, the IT teams can execute the security controls like firewalls, antivirus, passwords, encryption for safeguarding their system.
  • Configuration of monitoring tools: Configuring the monitoring tools will help obtain the crucial security control data, like log files from the deployed application.
  • Assessing data: Eventually, the data collected is evaluated for forming significant insights from various tools. Once done, it is utilized to decode all the security and operational concerns which need a proper solution.

 

Conclusion

With the evolving scenario, detecting the issues early not only solves the problem rightly, but also allows the companies to monitor the infrastructure, networking, and application performance on an instant basis. Therefore, the right kinds of Continuous Monitoring tools, such as Ansible, Slack, Chef, PagerDuty, Puppet, Sensu, etc. will assist in alleviating the continuous monitoring by alerting the early errors and showing the insight of productivity of the applications. Continuous Monitoring in DevOps is implemented rightly from the start till the end of SDLC, and also after the operation. Thus, the top concern is the automation of database performance monitoring for the implementation of DevOps productively.

Sanghamitra Roychoudhary

She is a professional Technical Writer, Content Marketing Specialist, Content Editor. Author of IT Techno Solutions. She's a learner for lifetime; and explores WordPress, and shares new and fresh findings to develop her proficiency and also help her audience with the latest IT learnings.

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Sanghamitra Roychoudhary

She is a professional Technical Writer, Content Marketing Specialist, Content Editor. Author of IT Techno Solutions. She's a learner for lifetime; and explores WordPress, and shares new and fresh findings to develop her proficiency and also help her audience with the latest IT learnings.

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