Operations uses monitoring to provide early detection of issues with systems/servers/networks. Among those monitoring options is Datadog, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud service/application monitoring tool that allows Operations to be notified of issues with their applications in near-real time. Development teams, meanwhile, use JIRA to track tickets and manage overall agile development.
But what if your product is the very thing that Operations manages? The sweet spot for DevOps is that location where the app is internally developed, and managed by Operations, because the entire stack is under IT management.
That’s why Datadog and JIRA are now integrated.
Datadog can monitor an infrastructure and application on a variety of levels at a variety of locations in the infrastructure stack, from disk availability to response times to memory usage. Datadog has the ability to monitor and emit alerts when things are abnormal or out of specified ranges, or they outright fail.
JIRA is Atlassian’s Agile project management software, with issue tracking and all of the usual agile tools in one place.
Now, Datadog can create JIRA tickets, update them as more information becomes available and populate them with relevant information from the running systems.
Say, for example, one cloud instance runs low on memory and passes over a threshold. Datadog detects the issue and opens a ticket in JIRA that shows what system and when, as well as whatever other information Operations has defined. That ticket is now in the system like any other, and a developer can grab it and look at memory use for the portions of the overall application that run on the instance in question.
According to the press release, these are the three automations included in this integration:
- Creating JIRA tickets when performance issues are detected within Datadog.
- Populating JIRA tickets with pertinent information about identified issues.
- Updating existing JIRA tickets when new information surfaces.
I’m an analytical person, so my first thought was, “How cool,” and my second was, “But what if it spams JIRA with non-development issues?” Since Operations configures what goes to JIRA, and Datadog supports alert rollups (multiple alerts in one or two notifications), it is possible to keep such spamming under control. An overzealous Operations staff initially might configure the reporting to send too much, but as experience grows, this should become a viable way to automate bug reporting. In particular, tagging of Datadog-generated events should show quickly what alerts are creating too many tickets, and give the team opportunity to change the way tickets are created—or, if it turns out they’re created because of a serious application-impacting error, raise the priority of the fix.
Which brings us to the updating status part. In Datadog, operations can leave a comment on an issue with an “@jira-update” tag and JIRA will get notified of the comment. That means Operations can raise awareness of an issue that may seem mundane but has larger impact than is obvious, or add detail to a JIRA ticket if needed, all from within Datadog.
It is interesting that Datadog is also integrated with BitBucket, another Atlassian product, so it is possible that opened tickets can be marked as “in test” when an integration build includes reference to the ticket. In short, BitBucket integration means that Datadog’s monitoring is aware of commits and checkouts, and Operations staff will be able to correlate that to issues that occur. Adding in JIRA integration means that Operations sees the commits, gets the alerts and updates JIRA. The wealth of information is such that you’ll want to use their various filtering techniques just to make certain you’re getting the important stuff.
There are some areas that are intriguing to me, such as the impact of a particularly complex set of queries/reductions on a big data platform. I haven’t tried the Hadoop integration, but it appears that this agent would be able to communicate that a given reduction is the source of the problem to the JIRA interface. Even if these complimentary integrations aren’t there yet, you can feel it coming to where “This reduction caused systemwide issues” is what is generated in JIRA. That’s pretty cool.
Overall, the integration of Datadog and JIRA is a DevOps dream come true, tying Operations closer into Development, and allowing Development changes to be tracked closer in Operations. After all, the point is to keep the systems running as close to peak efficiency as possible, and automate as much as can be. The issues spawning from Datadog alerts into JIRA tickets also pretty much guarantees increased need for development and operations to talk, as problems that crop up by the automated system are discussed and researched.
If you’re dedicated to a cooperative environment for Dev and Ops—even if you aren’t calling it DevOps—the Datadog/JIRA integration is worth a look.
