Monitoring: A critical step in the DevOps cycle

The adage “prevention is better than cure” is particularly relevant when implementing an infrastructure monitoring strategy in DevOps. Trainers therefore introduce participants to the right tools and show them how to implement observability and configure dashboards and alerts. 

Next, we discuss how to manage logs and all the tasks related to processing large volumes of data generated by systems. We present the landscape of tools available to use for these tasks, based on a table created by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Cloud-based tools have the advantage of being flexible based on demand as well as cost-effective.

The first part of this workshop ends with the strategic aspect of monitoring. Trainers describe ideal strategies for switching from reactivity to proactivity.

Self‑evaluation: Important for improving your performance

The second part of this workshop introduces different initiatives to implement for effective self‑evaluation. All players involved in system performance, regardless of the extent of their role, need to be up to speed. This is where we determine service levels, associated costs and impacts in the event of disaster or unavailability.

Trainers then discuss measures to implement during launching. Parameters for calculating how you stack up against industry leaders are identified to help you improve.

To wrap up this component, facilitators touch on how to plan outages, including budgeting, data to collect and event categories.

Adapt as you go: Users, incidents and dashboards

Just like infrastructure development and management, the monitoring component of the DevOps cycle must also adapt to changes.

Here, trainers review the various categories of data to analyze to improve user experience.

We then present an overview of incident management, including all types of incidents. Trainers highlight the importance of categorizing, prioritizing and cataloguing them based on an incident matrix and their level of urgency.

The theoretical component ends with a discussion of dashboards, a favourite topic for many.  Through two labs, participants experiment with creating business metrics and alerting with Prometheus. They also study all the monitoring boards to set up in terms of infrastructure, processes and organization.  

Dive even deeper into DevOps: Security, architecture and data analysis 

We touch on the hot topic of security to deepen participants’ learning. It is crucial that you implement best practices to protect yourself from potential attacks, as security is always a concern. 

To help ensure participants are well-prepared in terms of security, trainers present future methods for managing data that will allow for more accurate predictions and foresight: DataOps, AIOps and ITOps. 

We finish up the session with a wide-ranging discussion of monitoring, which applies to an entire organization. Practices must comply with reference standards and norms based on architecture and policies in place (IT4IT, ITIL, TOGAF, ArchiMate).

To conclude 

Trainers take the opportunity to answer participants’ questions regarding their technological challenges. 

In addition to this training component, Gologic offers delivery capacity assessments to evaluate your DevOps maturity level.

We aim to provide guidance to teams to increase their awareness of, and to automate, their roles and processes, with the objective of increasing the speed and quality of their performance.

Switch from silo mode to collaborative mode!