As we’ve moved into the 2020s, the DevOps industry has seen a huge increase in the amount of software being developed and released. This means that teams are releasing more code faster than ever before. But with all that speed comes risk – and it’s up to you to manage it.
DevOps professionals constantly strive to improve work processes and always look for ways to make them more efficient and effective. One of the best ways to do that is through proactive problem-solving.
This article will lay out some key elements of proactive problem-solving in DevOps, including root cause analysis, observability, monitoring, empowered communication and automated processes.
1. Root Cause Analysis
The first step towards effective problem solving is to identify and diagnose the root cause of the problem. Root cause analysis (RCA) is a method of finding the real source of a problem by identifying all related causes, instead of just addressing its symptoms.
For example, if your application is experiencing high latency during peak hours, you might think that it’s because there’s too much traffic on the network. However, if you perform RCA and find out that there’s actually no connection between network traffic and latency during peak hours, then you can come up with other possible solutions like adding more servers or upgrading your hardware.
2. Monitoring
It’s important to know when something goes wrong so you can address it quickly before it becomes more serious — like an outage or security breach — but that can only happen if you have enough data available about each server. You’ll also need access to these metrics to see how they trend over time.
The best way to monitor DevOps is to use a platform that provides visibility into all aspects of your system. In addition, monitoring should be done at every stage of development: from testing to staging and production environments. This will give you an early warning about potential problems with your application or infrastructure so that you can take action before things get out of hand.
3. Observability
One of the main characteristics of DevOps in recent days is observability, or being able to track what is happening at every step in the software development process. Observability allows us to see how an application performs in real-time, so we can make informed decisions about handling issues that arise.
It is important to clarify observability vs. monitoring, especially since both terms are frequently interchanged and misunderstood.
Observability is a relatively new term in the DevOps vernacular. It’s an attempt to describe how we can observe changes in state as they occur in our system. On the other hand, monitoring is a much older concept that operations teams have traditionally used to keep an eye on their infrastructure and applications.
The difference between observability and monitoring is that observability is about observing the real-time behavior of your system, whereas monitoring is about collecting historical data about events that have already occurred.
4. Empowered Communication
Communication is a key part of DevOps because it enables collaboration by connecting technology and processes between teams who may not be familiar with each other’s workflows or tools.
To solve a problem effectively and bridge gaps, it’s important for everyone involved to be on the same page and understand what’s going on. This includes technical and non-technical staff, such as managers, business analysts and other stakeholders who may not have a technical background but are still interested in how things work behind the scenes.
Empowered communication allows everyone involved to communicate openly about their concerns while providing each other with feedback on how they can improve their processes so they’re more efficient and effective overall.
5. Automated Processes
In a DevOps environment, automated processes are crucial to achieve continuous delivery and accelerate the time-to-market of new features or products. Automation also enables teams to focus on higher-level tasks instead of spending time on routine tasks that don’t require human intervention. This increases efficiency and reduces errors over time by freeing employees’ time to focus on more meaningful work.
Automating processes also enables you to track their progress and performance more easily, which helps prevent bottlenecks and other issues from occurring. This ensures that changes made by different teams are implemented consistently across the entire organization.
Conclusion
During a DevOps transformation cycle, the culture and environment must adapt to a new paradigm of collaboration, scalability and automation. The idea is to align the entire team – including developers, testers and operations – to deliver features faster and more efficiently than ever before.