DevOps Pipeline: All You Need to Know About Continuous Monitoring

Continuous Control Monitoring (CCM), is an automated process that helps DevOps personnel to observe and detect compliance issues and security threats to monitor, detect and study key relevant metrics. It assists IT organizations, DevOps teams in particular, with procuring real-time data from public and hybrid environments. This is especially helpful for security measures to be implemented and fortified with incident response, threat assessment, computers, and database forensics, and root cause analysis.

It is across each phase of the DevOps pipeline. Further, it helps find ways to resolve said issues in real-time. The automated process of identifying compliance issues early on during the development lifecycle, continuous monitoring, has even gained quite a bit of popularity of late. It also helps provide general feedback on the overall health of the IT setup, including offsite networks and deployed software.

This comes at the end of the DevOps pipeline and once the software is released into production, continuous monitoring notifies dev and QA teams about specific issues arising in the production environment. It even provides feedback on what is going wrong that allows the relevant people to work on necessary fixes as soon as possible. The automated process of identifying compliance issues early on during the development lifecycle, Continuous Monitoring, has gained quite a bit of popularity of late.

To help you understand why that is, we will first start this discussion with a quick overview of the different types of continuous monitoring in DevOps.

1. Network monitoring: With network monitoring, the goal is to find and tend to all network-related issues, of course. The process also involves alerting the respective teams to help them avoid crashes and prevent downtimes.
2. Infrastructure monitoring: This involves using DevOps monitoring tools to watch the organization’s IT infrastructure for delivery of the end product, i.e. hardware, software, data centers, servers, networks, etc.
3. Application monitoring: Under the purview of such continuous monitoring, the system helps keep an eye on the performance of the released app.

Now let's see some of the concept’s key advantages.

• Quicker incident response: The process of continuous monitoring bridges the time gaps between the identification of an issue and the appropriate team being alerted about said issue. It is vital to ensure these issues are tended to promptly to allay the risks associated with such security risks and operational problems. Continually monitoring the system also drives a mechanism to send out alerts and real-time security monitoring to prevent damage to the app’s performance.
• Drive better business performance: It helps cut down the tasks of tending to app issues that take a toll on the customer experience, safeguards against losses owing to risks, and empowers companies to better maintain the credibility of their businesses.
• Increased network transparency: With continuous monitoring, teams can achieve absolute transparency during the DevOps process. It offers all requisite details about the technical setup’s status, gathers data, and then automatically analyzes it too. This, then, allows one to ensure that crucial events are not missed out.

Time to take a look at some of the best practices now.

• Ensure the app tools track user interactions, user response time, page loading speed, etc.
• Task the infrastructure tools with the responsibility for monitoring the health of the server as well as the database, security, etc.
• The network tools will watch over the server’s bandwidth, any network lags, and multi-port metrics among other things.

Let us wrap this up with a quick implementation guide:

1. Identify which systems need continuous monitoring: Start by identifying systems that need to be continuously monitored.
2. Risk analysis: This step allows the company to determine aspects of the app that may be more vulnerable to risks than others.
3. Select a security control system: The team can then adopt security measures such as passwords, antivirus, encryption, firewalls, etc. to safeguard the system.
4. Set up monitoring systems: Configure the continuous monitoring tools to collect log files from the application.
5. Analyze data: The captured data must be examined to identify and understand security and operational issues that must be addressed.

Continuous monitoring may be a resource-heavy process but as the above discussion demonstrates, it is completely worth the effort it necessitates. So, if you too want to be able to keep close an eye on application performance, infrastructure, and the network, we highly recommend you start looking for an expert DevOps service provider who can adeptly integrate continuous monitoring in your project’s development.