The role of application performance monitoring (APM) in DevOps

DevOps has enforced efforts toward abrupt development in application and features that enhance the pace of innovations leading to huge risks on the business revenue. Application Performance Monitoring in DevOps can “grease the wheels” throughout the delivery lifecycle and further optimize the application delivery.

Rationales for the adoption of DevOps

DevOps combines the siloed Dev and Ops for improving the agility and achieving several qualities with benefits. We can enrich well-defined collaboration between developers and operation specialists by using shared DevOps tools and even facilitate the delivery of software through collaborative testing from the development to the release processes. With DevOps, we can automate manual processes in release management, monitoring, infrastructure establishment, orchestration, containerization, and virtualization. DevOps remediate the misalignments of people and goals, developing a relationship between developers and operations. Moreover, it incorporates customer feedback for facilitating agile development.

As per Enterprise Management Associates [EMA], DevOps enables contributing for year-over-year revenue growth around 25 percent yielding high IT value. As per EMA Research, APM solutions can readily remediate the barriers resulting in the high rates of production.

Need for APM in DevOps

Many organizations and enterprises are leveraging DevOps approach to achieve seamless collaboration. DevOps remains as an enterprise capability, which supports enabling continuous software delivery and deployment. The agile environment in the IT sector involving frequent changes in applications, complex infrastructures, virtual environments, cloud services, and distributed data leads to several difficulties in the support process. The conventional process entails manuals tasks of identification, fixation of the bugs, and performance issues in the development stage. APM resolves the problem of manual processes including identification, mitigation, and improvement of the performance with higher agility and flexibility in the enterprise capability.

According to research by EMA, Seventy percent of the organizations reveal that the manual troubleshooting process is the prominent barrier in the delivery pipeline.

In the DevOps approach, the monitoring phase remains essential as it involves intelligent monitoring, analysis, and management of the cloud, hybrid, on-premise, and IT infrastructure. You can monitor your users’ experience by enabling APM solutions and enhancing the stability of your application infrastructure. It proactively determines the root cause of issues, rapidly prohibits outages and delivers expected user satisfaction. By implementing APM in DevOps, more customers are broadening the scope of monitoring into several environments such as staging, testing, and development. By adopting the APM solutions earlier in the software development life cycle, the development team gets more insights in advance regarding the working of the applications within the production that allows taking corrective action much earlier.

Roles of Application Performance Monitoring [APM] in DevOps

Following are a few roles of the APM in DevOps that support delivering continuous monitoring throughout the application delivery:

• Integrated performance monitoring: Identification of the bugs earlier with the intention of optimized coding without the recreation of test scenarios.
• Alert Management: Resources from different teams such as development, testing, and operations need to send notifications via text, voice mail, email, and mobile push notifications at the time of specific situations or events in corresponding environments.
• Analytics: Developers identify patterns based on event logs and correlate them to explore insights regarding problems. Operations staff can perform root cause analysis over these multiple logs for detecting the exact source of the issue in the applications. These insights and analytics further support in decision management.
• Deployment Automation: Developers, testers, and operations staff utilize several tools for scheduling and deploying applications with a configuration in corresponding environments, thus improving collaboration among these environments without potential replication and erroneous information.

Application Performance Monitoring offers an efficient solution consisting of custom features to deliver the application with the best quality alongside a realistic feedback loop from development to operations for seamless user experience.