DevOps has enabled companies to enhance their capacity to scale applications to fulfil essential requirements and to monitor these systems, so they remain available and configured correctly.
DevOps, the integration of development and operations, enables organizations to operate in a more agile manner; thus, enabling them to swiftly adapt to changes in the market and upcoming trends. This agility allows businesses to remain competitive in today’s rapidly evolving and highly demanding marketplace.
Observability and monitoring have become increasingly important in the DevOps landscape. It may initially appear to simply refer to the ability to monitor the activity within applications, however upon further examination, it is clear that there is much more complexity to the concept.
Observability plays an important role in DevOps. DevOps observability is a solution that allows DevOps teams to debug systems in realtime, based on patterns that have not been pre-defined before deployment. This provides valuable insights into system performance and can help to identify issues quickly.
The capacity to observe something allows one to
- Give an account of how well something is functioning as a whole.
- Send in a status report.
- Check on critical indicators.
- Fix bugs in working systems.
- Find out anything you can about a system that you didn’t know before.
- Examine the unintended consequences of system upgrades and other modifications.
- Find the source, analyse the issue, and identify the faulty service or system.
- Prevent deterioration and power interruptions.
- Organize your resources more efficiently.
Observability is essential if your business is serious about gaining insights from its DevOps efforts.
Building in Observability and Monitoring
It is not possible to expect one individual to implement monitoring and observability to support DevOps across all systems. Achieving true observability requires the delegation of control over monitoring and observation to teams that are working on specific software stacks and services.
To effectively deploy monitoring and observability, you must first do the following:
- Find the approach that works best for your company and its infrastructure.
- Choose the KPIs that will best measure your company’s success.
- Maintain a vigilant vigil on system event records.
- Implement tools to start, stop, and reset logging systems.
- Calls coming into and going out of a system must be logged.
- Create charts and graphs to better see patterns in your data.
- Get (or create) an observability platform that suits your needs.
- Improve tracking and reaction time with the use of AI and other forms of automation.
Substantive Elements of Observability
In order to enhance the visibility of your DevOps infrastructure, there are a range of available options. For example, the following could be considered:
- To keep an eye on your Kubernetes installations, use ContainIQ.
- AppDynamics is an end-to-end application and infrastructure monitoring solution.
- Datadog is a platform for observability that places a premium on communication and cooperation.
- Dynatrace specialises in monitoring the end-user experience, profiling user-defined transactions and performing in-depth analysis of individual components.
- Honeycomb – gives you visibility into how your apps are doing.
- Lightstep is a tool for keeping tabs on and analysing cloud-native programmes.
- Cloud-based monitoring service LogicMonitor.
- All of an application’s stack may be monitored and debugged using New Relic.
- Splunk — keeps an eye on the cloud.
- The log management tool known as Sumo Logic.
The tools to be used will be decided based on the standards that must be adhered to within your organization. The updates are beneficial; however, you may require a set of compatible tools to effectively manage complex, multi-level and comprehensive implementation of the systems that are being updated.
If you are leveraging the power of Kubernetes to deploy containerized applications and services, you may wish to consider using a combination of ContainIQ and AppDynamics to monitor the underlying infrastructure.
Programs such as Kubesphere provide comprehensive observability into the whole stack, from the underlying infrastructure to individual applications, when deployed on Kubernetes or Linux servers.
Gains from Transparency
Observability provides DevOps teams with numerous benefits, beyond just the monitoring of applications, systems, and infrastructure. It gives teams the confidence to quickly identify and address any issues, helping to ensure optimal system performance is maintained.
Access to observability can help to facilitate quicker and more reliable product releases from development teams. The software development lifecycle can be significantly improved by gaining insights from teams that are closely monitoring their progress.
Observability facilitates collaboration across DevOps teams, enabling them to be aligned with corporate objectives. This is due to the availability of data that can be used to monitor progress towards those goals.
You can maintain your company’s agility and put the focus on innovation and digital transformation with the help of observability.
Conclusion
Integrating observability into your pipelines and systems can be challenging, however the benefits you will gain make the effort worthwhile.
While observability isn’t strictly required to keep a firm running, it is essential if you want to keep up with the competition.
