DevOps 360

Continuous monitoring is a monitoring approach that focuses on increased automation and integration of tools to unify data, metrics, and insights around application performance, security threats and vulnerabilities, compliance risks, user experience, and more. It essentially integrates application, infrastructure, and network monitoring. Continuous monitoring can help DevOps teams detect and resolve application issues quickly, avoid unplanned outages, and meet their performance targets as well as business goals effectively.

Continuous monitoring in theory involves monitoring the health, performance, and reliability of both your application and infrastructure components across development and production. As every cloud service provider offers its own monitoring solution, DevOps teams often have to track different dashboards to ensure continuous monitoring. Controlling virtual sprawl and costs, and ensuring every application component is compliant, secure, and available becomes challenging due to the lack of unified monitoring. That’s why it is recommended to gather all your data from the application and its underlying network and infrastructure in one place for continuous monitoring in DevOps. This data can include:

• Throughput
• Browser speed
• SLA status
• CPU, Storage, & Disk Usage
• Server Availability/ Uptime Trends
• Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) & other response times
• Latency
• Diagnostics logs & insights
• Container insights, and more

It is important to note here that data from a single source can only tell so much; it is important to correlate data from different sources to troubleshoot issues or find opportunities for continuous improvement. In this respect, teams need to visualize their data, should have the ability to easily slice and dice the data, define their own formulas and thresholds for alerts, establish quality gates, and derive contextual insights from plain text data. Gathr makes all this simple with its DevOps 360 solution.

Here are some of the benefits of continuous monitoring in DevOps:

Enhanced Operations: With automated data collection and streamlined end-to-end visibility, teams can collaborate better to detect and mitigate security and performance issues.

Proactive Response: With unified visibility, teams can configure more accurate threshold and event-based alerts to respond quickly and troubleshoot issues before they snowball into a major outage.

Cost Savings: Teams can analyze resource consumption data over a period to detect cyclic trends and over-provisioning/under-provisioning issues. It can allow organizations to ensure the most efficient usage of resources (CPU, RAM, etc.).

Better End User Experience: With timely, hiccup-free deliveries and quicker resolution of performance issues, users get a better application experience.

Today, teams rely on different dashboards to monitor their applications and the underlying infrastructure. Hybrid or multi-cloud environments add to the complexity. Teams need to set up various dashboards using Elastic Search, Logstash, Grafana, Nagios, Prometheus, CloudWatch, etc. to monitor different aspects of applications and the environment. However, it’s not always simple to gather data and configure dashboards that provide actionable intelligence. Hence, it’s important to define monitoring goals, select the right KPIs, and shortlist a scalable and flexible monitoring solution that can simplify search, filtering, visualization, and analytics. You can classify data and insights into different segments such as server status and health, security and vulnerability trends, resource consumption and costs, development milestones, user experience, and more.

To automate data capturing and synchronization across your DevOps environment, you need to ensure that all tasks and tools across your environment are well integrated and orchestrated. These integrations can get complex, posing several restrictions, and requiring frequent updates. Gathr takes care of all such integration complexities with its bi-directional connectors that pave the way for automated insights delivery. bi-directional connectors