What is Continuous Monitoring in DevOps?
Fundamentally, Continuous Monitoring(CM), sometimes called Continuous Control Monitoring (CCM), is an automated process by which DevOps personnel can observe and detect compliance issues and security threats during each phase of the DevOps pipeline. Continuous Monitoring comes in at the end of the DevOps pipeline. Once software is released into production, Continuous Monitoring will notify dev and QA teams in the event of specific issues arising in the prod environment. It provides feedback on what is going wrong, which allows the relevant people to work on necessary fixes as soon as possible.
Goals of Continuous Monitoring in DevOps
- Enhance transparency and visibility of IT and network operations, especially those that can trigger a security breach, and resolve it with a well-timed alert system.
- Help monitor software operation, especially performance issues, identify the cause of the error, and apply appropriate solutions before significant damage to uptime and revenue.
- Help track user behavior, especially right after an update to a particular site or app has been pushed to prod. This monitors if the update has a positive, negative, or neutral effect on user experience.
Benefits of Continuous Monitoring
- Better Network Visibility and Transparency: CM offers DevOps teams clarity on the state of the IT infrastructure by automatically collecting and analyzing data to reflect possible outages and important trends.
- Facilitates Rapid Responses: This enables timely response to security threats or functional stop-gaps, minimizing damage and allowing faster restoration of the system to optimal operational levels.
- Minimizes System Downtime: Consistent system monitoring and quick, necessary alerts help maintain system uptime by raising the alarm when there is a service outage or any application performance issues.
- Assists with Healthy Business Performance: Continuous Monitoring tools can be used to track user reactions to software updates, which is useful for several teams — development, QA, sales, marketing, customer service, etc.
What does testing have to do with it?
To ensure that the CM system is not going on overdrive, release software that has been thoroughly tested on real browsers and devices. Emulators and simulators simply do not offer the real user conditions that software must run within, making the results of any tests run on them inaccurate. Consider testing websites and apps on a real device cloud, preferably one that offers the latest devices, browsers, and OS versions. This applies to both manual testing and automation testing.
Look for a cloud Selenium grid for automated testing, which can be accelerated with parallel testing. It should also provide integrations with popular CI/CD tools such as Jira, Jenkins, TeamCity, Travis CI, etc. There should also be debugging tools that let testers identify and resolve bugs immediately.
Continuous Monitoring is pivotal in enhancing operational, security, and business performance. It should be seen as an integral part of every DevOps pipeline, crucial to achieving efficiency, scalability, and better-quality product.
