Explained: Monitoring & Telemetry in Devops

DevOps is a data-driven software development lifecycle (SDLC) framework. DevOps engineers analyze logs and metrics data generated across all software components and the underlying hardware infrastructure. This helps them understand a variety of areas:

• Application and system performance
• Usage patterns
• Bugs
• Security and regulatory issues
• Opportunities for improvement

Extensive application monitoring and telemetry is required before an application achieves the coveted Service Level Agreement (SLA) uptime of five 9’s or more: available at least 99.999% of the time. But what exactly is monitoring and telemetry and how does it fit into a DevOps environment? Let’s discuss.

(This article is part of our DevOps Guide. Use the right-hand menu to go deeper into individual practices and concepts.)

What is monitoring?

Monitoring is a common IT practice. In the context of DevOps, monitoring entails the process of collecting logs and metrics data to observe and detect performance and compliance at every stage of the SDLC pipeline. Monitoring involves tooling that can be programmed to

• Procure specific log data streams
• Produce an intuitive visual representation of the metrics performance
• Create alerts based on specified criteria

The goals of monitoring in DevOps include:

• Improve visibility and control of app components and IT infrastructure operations. Applications can range from cybersecurity to resource optimization. For instance, monitoring tools can alert incidents of network breaches and excessive network traffic at a specific node.
• Monitor application performance issues, identify bugs, and understand how specific app components behave in production and test environments. Once deployed, monitoring tools alert on several metrics to track resource utilization and workload distribution. With this information, engineers can allocate resources to account for dynamic traffic and workload demands.
• Understand user and market behavior. This information can help engineers make technical decisions such as adding a specific feature, removing a button, or investing in cloud resources to further improve the SLA performance. Proactive decision making in this regard helps organizations maintain and expand their market share in the competitive business landscape.

(Explore continuous delivery metrics, including monitoring.)

What is telemetry?

Telemetry is a subset of monitoring and refers to the mechanism of representing the measurement data provided by a monitoring tool. Telemetry can be seen as agents that can be programmed to extract specific monitoring data such as:

• High-volume time-series information on resource utilization
• Real-time alerting for specific incidents