Treating observability and monitoring as core DevOps practices—not afterthoughts—helps teams deploy faster while maintaining reliability and gaining a competitive advantage.
With more emphasis than ever before on finding a competitive advantage, many engineering teams are caught in a trap between deploying more and more software faster and faster and keeping everything running smoothly. Some of the original core tenets of DevOps, such as effective feedback loops, often fail here.
A good DevOps strategy can help. A sensible approach to observability and testing strategies makes it easier for engineers to deploy software that works reliably and is easy to run.
In the agile world, we often speak of building products iteratively and based on lean principles, seeking feedback from stakeholders throughout the process. This same principle can pay off richly when applied to observability and monitoring, with several possibilities for monitoring applications from both a system and user perspective. It’s not easy, though, with monitoring often seen as an afterthought when it could actually be a big enabler for deploying reliable code.
Step into the light with observability
Adding observability to software prevents it from being a black box where the internal operations are impenetrable and invisible. Unobservable software fails hard in an old-school “throw it over the wall” environment – with Ops engineers often left with few choices other than “restart it and see if that fixes it” when there’s a problem.
We need to get more proactive here. We can begin by understanding software’s memory and CPU usage, along with other performance metrics, such as responsiveness, which adds vital context that supports the shared responsibility model in which good DevOps teams operate.
Deploying good observability tools provides system visibility and data accessibility, a core principle of DevOps. This:
- Helps teams detect problems early, allowing them to fix them before they start affecting users.
- Enables development and operations teams to collaborate more effectively for incident management and system enhancement activities.
- Eliminates the practice of "throwing it over the wall" to operations teams because developers can monitor their code execution in production environments.
- Promotes DevOps collective ownership, with cross-functional teams being responsible for managing applications from start to finish.
Make more of metrics, logs, and traces
The three observability pillars of metrics, logs, and traces form a unified trifecta that breaks down the traditional separation between development and operations teams. Here’s how:
- Metrics: teams can measure system performance aligned to meaningful business metrics by using the quantitative data that good metrics can provide.
- Logs: the logging element records specific application and infrastructure events, and state modifications.
- Traces: tracing provides insight into service interactions across multiple systems and is an essential tool to find system performance bottlenecks. Having properly correlated data types allows teams to identify significant system events while also understanding their causes and the individual component roles in system behaviour.
Managing observability infrastructure requires the same level of dedication that developers apply to their application code, and it’s essential to manage monitoring configurations, alert rules, and dashboard definitions in a version control system.
Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for observability platforms helps ensure consistency across monitoring in all environments. Observability testing should run through continuous integration and deployment pipelines to ensure that new releases introduce effective instrumentation and don’t regress existing monitoring functionality. This allows engineers to couple observability relevant to the software they are deploying.
Build monitoring tools into the codebase
Developers need to be on board with working with Operations people to roll-out appropriate observability for their software. Having developers add monitoring tools directly to their codebase requires them to find suitable performance indicators, logging levels, and tracing data collection rates. And the monitoring system needs to measure technical system performance alongside business-critical events to help teams understand how system operations affect user results.
The best DevOps organisations share observability duties between platform engineering teams, who deliver monitoring tools and standards, and application teams, who add service-specific instrumentation to their platforms.
Taking observability and monitoring to the next level
Organisations that have achieved higher levels of DevOps maturity have demonstrably more mature observability. Getting started for teams involves basic monitoring, which includes collecting infrastructure data and setting up an alerting system. More mature practices lead teams to implement application performance monitoring alongside user experience tracking and distributed tracing capabilities.
DevOps teams at an advanced level utilise observability data to create automated responses and predictive scaling systems to continuously optimise their infrastructure. High-performing organisations measure the four essential DORA metrics for measuring DevOps maturity, including deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time to restore service, and change failure rate.
Amplify the effectiveness of your DevOps practices
Mastering observability through good DevOps practices can give organisations a substantial market advantage. Here’s how:
- Effective monitoring systems are a force multiplier for organisations, enabling them to resolve incidents much faster, shortening the time needed to restore services after problems emerge.
- Development teams that detect performance issues at an early stage can avoid expensive production fixes.
- Observability platforms generate data that helps organisations plan capacity needs, understand feature usage, and optimise their infrastructure.
- The ability to detect and respond quickly to unexpected system behaviour gives teams with excellent observability the confidence to deploy more regularly.
DevOps teams face a critical challenge in establishing proper observability and monitoring systems. The path to success demands both technical mastery of instrumentation and platform management, as well as organisational shifts that foster teamwork and shared accountability.
Organisations that delay implementing observability often overlook system blind spots, resulting in longer incident resolution times and a loss of confidence in deployment. While organisations that implement observability as a core part of their DevOps practices are building a permanent base for delivering high-performance software at speed.
Investing in complete system visibility generates benefits throughout the software development lifecycle, supporting modern business requirements for speed and reliability.
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