DevOps is a hot topic in IT! DevOps is everywhere. Everyone is trying to adopt, associate or identify themselves as DevOps enabled. Here are some examples of common DevOps “tools”: Ansible, Chef, Cloudify, Jenkins, OpsWorks, Puppet, Saltstack. These are incorrectly identified as DevOps tools. Instead, they are automation solutions that can enable DevOps processes. Tools don’t make DevOps – Processes and Culture make DevOps succeed.
The monitoring necessary for effective DevOps to transform your heritage focused monitoring posture into an observability mindset is essential to DevOps transformations. The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) and Observability discipline capabilities are called everything from a trendy tech DevOps buzzword to a “monitoring on-steroids” must-have. The truth is more involved — especially given the increased complexity of the modern infrastructure and the undisputed need for better monitoring higher in the stack, and deeper in the system.
Are you still “getting by” with legacy IT monitoring approaches? Don’t miss out on current observability capabilities, thanks in large part to machine learning and predictive analytics. Increase your organizations capabilities from a reactive, proactive monitoring posture to a predictive, preventative capability. A data-driven, predictive approach to IT monitoring and observability is one aspect of transforming organizations into the world of New IT.
DevOps Teams requiring operational visibility have expanded beyond sys admins and IT Ops analysts even developers are taking greater ownership of knowing what’s going on for a better customer experience. To effectively do this, all roles need visibility inside their entire architecture from third-party apps and services to their own to fix and eventually prevent problems. When that capability is built-in the premise of observability, it not only makes visibility easier, enables greater insight and leaves more time for more strategic initiatives, but it’s also critical to the overall success of Site Reliability Engineering. This provides a bridge between developers releasing code and operators maintaining infrastructure impacted by code. In order for DevOps processes to be effective, monitoring visibility needs to shift to include development. This is where the SRE and Observability help transform the mindset of the Development and Operations Teams. Developers are thinking of what makes sense to expose in the service delivery chain from a health and performance perspective. Operations teams are aligning to understand the business value indicators to more closely focus on customer experience than solely monitoring the infrastructure compute, storage, and network. This new service focused approach of observability enables DevOps transformations to deliver a delighted customer experience.
The rich data sources provided by an observability culture are the foundation to move from a reactive operational posture to a predictive operational stance. When the new-found observability, metrics are leveraged by advanced analytics and machine learning, staff can predict outages and can monitor degradation for proactive replacement.
In summary, wherever you are on the journey of DevOps transformation, ensure the best customer outcomes by including the role of a SRE and the cultural adoption of Observability concept into your DevOps ecosystem.
Let Mobius Partners’ monitoring and analytics experts help transition your organization with modern capabilities for better IT outcomes. Please let us know when you would like to meet and discover your path to the future. Mobius Partners has resources and white papers around SRE and Observability or we’d be happy to discuss your specific situation. Please reach out for more information: johnk@mobiuspartners.com.
John Kiefer
Practice Manager Enterprise DevOps and Observabilty
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You can dig into the following links for more information:
Site Reliability Engineering concept was born out of Google: https://landing.google.com/sre/books/
More readings on Observability:
Observability is in our DNA at Möbius Partners
the agile admin – Monitoring & Observability
https://medium.com/@copyconstruct/monitoring-and-observability-8417d1952e1c
