To enable faster and better response to changing customer needs, enterprises are increasing their release frequency for applications. This, in turn, demands tighter alignment and collaboration than traditionally has been seen between the line of business, development and IT operations, driving the need for enhanced collaboration, automation and information transparency among these groups. To achieve seamless internal collaboration, many enterprise customers are adopting a DevOps approach.

DevOps is an enterprise capability that enables the continuous delivery and continuous deployment of software. It reduces the time needed to address customer feedback. DevOps brings once-siloed Dev and Ops together to improve agility and achieve these benefits:

• Improves collaboration between developers and operations specialists by using shared DevOps tools.
• Facilitates continuous delivery of software by enabling collaborative testing throughout the development and release processes.
• Automates the manual processes of release management, infrastructure provisioning, orchestration, monitoring, containerization and virtualization.
• Corrects misalignments of people and goals by building closer links between developers and operations.
• Incorporates customer feedback in the development process to facilitate agile development.

IBM has identified six phases in the DevOps life cycle, plus necessary cultural considerations, for successful implementation of a DevOps approach (Fig 1).

Fig. 1 – Six phases of the DevOps life cycle

In the Manage phase of the DevOps life cycle, continuous monitoring of applications in production environments is typically implemented with application performance management (APM) solutions that intelligently monitor, analyze and manage cloud, on-premise and hybrid applications and IT infrastructure. These APM solutions enable you to monitor your users’ experience and improve the stability of your application infrastructure. It helps identify the root cause of issues quickly to proactively prevent outages and keep users satisfied.

With a DevOps approach, we are also seeing more customers broaden the scope of continuous monitoring into the staging, testing and even development environments. This is possible because development and test teams that are following a DevOps approach are striving to use production-like environments for testing as much as possible. By running APM solutions earlier in the life cycle, development teams get feedback in advance of how applications will eventually perform in production and can take corrective action much earlier. In addition, operations teams that now are advising the development teams get advance knowledge and experience to better prepare and tune the production environment, resulting in far more stable releases into production.

Applications are more business critical than ever. They must be always up, always fast and always improving. Embracing a DevOps approach will allow you to reduce your cycle times to hours instead of months, but you have to keep ensuring a great user experience! Continuous monitoring of your entire DevOps life cycle will ensure development and operations teams collaborate to optimize the user experience every step of the way, leaving more time for your next big innovation.

This continuous monitoring blog is the first in a series that focuses on collaboration between development and operations teams. We will explore this topic in detail in upcoming blogs:

• Synthetic Monitoring: Developers, testers and operations staff all need to ensure that their internet and intranet mobile applications and web applications are tested and operate successfully from different points of presence around the world.
• Alert Management: Developers, testers and operations staff all need to send notifications via email, voice mail, text, mobile push notifications and Slack messages when specific situations or events occur in development, testing or production environments, to get the right people’s attention and to manage their response.
• Deployment Automation: Developers, testers and operations staff use different tools to schedule and deploy complex applications and configure them in development, testing and production environments. We will discuss the best practices for these teams to collaborate effectively and efficiently and avoid potential duplication and erroneous information.
• Analytics: Developers need to be able to look for patterns in log messages to identify if there is a problem in the code. Operations need to do root cause analysis across multiple log files to identify the source of the problem in complex application and systems.

Stay tuned for the next blog on synthetic monitoring in the series and register for an upcoming interactive webcast, “Learn Why We Must Shift APM Left in the DevOps Lifecycle.”

About the Author / Arun Biligiri

Arun Biligiri is the leader of the Application Performance Management Offering Management team at IBM. Arun has over 20 years of experience in technology in various different roles including entrepreneurial, development, product management and sales engineering. He has worked closely with innovative enterprises and has extensive experience in addressing cloud, analytics needs in efficiently managing their data centers and clouds. He has an MBA from the Wharton School, and MS from the University of California, Berkeley. Connect with Arun on Twitter / LinkedIn