Introduction
The focus is shifting toward observability with the rise of distributed applications and data silos that need an almost 100% uptime guarantee with the assurance of no data loss. Modern software applications have deeply interconnected dependencies and lineage. Legacy monitoring strategies don’t suffice when integrating multiple services and deploying them with an iterative feedback loop.
The need to develop and implement monitoring solutions has branched various innovative approaches. Monitoring as Code is an efficient and promising approach for implementing modern monitoring solutions through code for a seamless CI/CD. Let us understand the role of Monitoring as Code for extensive monitoring.
The Importance of Monitoring as Code
Every interaction and the data flow between internal and external services is crucial for enterprises. With a lack of robust monitoring, service disruptions and data spillage can go unnoticed. Tracking and logging these activities for analysis is common for business continuity and improvements. Ad hoc monitoring services don’t cut the chase anymore. Evolving businesses are continuously experimenting with new tools to derive value and insights. Legacy monitoring solutions need more extensibility and flexibility, slowing down enterprise growth.
Enterprises are heavily investing in microservice deployment strategies. The involvement of microservices and corresponding dependencies demands extra attention to trace and understand the interactions for debugging and monitoring. Programmatic monitoring solutions using Monitoring as Code are rising with diverse features to implement and integrate advanced use cases. Monitoring as Code is a perfect approach to rapidly build dynamic monitoring solutions that are scalable and consistent across environments with integration capabilities to onboard third-party or custom services for advanced observability.
Augmentation with Infrastructure as Code
Monitoring as Code can deliver exponential value when combined with Infrastructure as Code. A streamlined domain-specific solution can be derived to trigger an event and capture its outcome with behavior. They complement each other, offering detailed and performant solutions concerning CI/CD.
The dynamic monitoring approach provides numerous benefits to attain consistent durability and delivery. The ability to handle and manage services along with their state and interactions through code opens up the possibility of handling real-time telemetry data to apply self-healing and auto-remediating solutions. The compatibility, analysis, optimizations, alerting, and testing of CI/CD can be accomplished by augmenting the following:
Cloud and Service Compatibility
Enterprise cloud adoption varies based on use cases. At times, leveraging promising services from different third-party providers as SaaS to achieve the final goal can be noticed. Integrating SaaS services for delivering best-in-class value with security can be supplemented with cloud services to derive a unique solution. These solutions can exhibit incompatibilities sometimes when unsupported feeds are encountered.
A generalized solution can be crafted to integrate and manage multiple SaaS services for provisioning and managing CI/CD using Monitoring as Code and Infrastructure as Code capabilities.
Continuous Profiling
Cloud applications generate telemetry data that can be written to a data lake. Leveraging the Monitoring as Code capabilities, teams can create custom scripts for advanced analysis of telemetry data to adjust auto scaling groups, alerting rules, and service thresholds while controlling real-time activities to boost performance.
Through the gathered insights, continuous profiling as part of CI/CD can prove beneficial to pinpoint which application or code modules have higher resource utilization and identify performance bottlenecks to optimize the applications.
Self-Healing with Comprehensive Alerting
The telemetry data can be the source to analyze and portray the faulty patterns in existing integrations and deployments. This analysis can help debug in real-time by applying pre-configured solutions to issues. These solutions can auto-remediate repeated issues and performance bottlenecks in real-time as they arise from a particular or a group of services.
The programmatic nature of the Monitoring as Code approach enables teams to build unique alerting solutions that can be triggered based on patterns, thresholds, and latencies. These alerting solutions can act as failsafe mechanisms when the pre-defined self-healing solutions fall short or when we need to gather and notify teams about service health, resource utilization metrics, and anomalies.
Custom Programmatic Tests
Integration and deployment of applications are getting better with the advancement in DevOps. However, the UI nature of most monitoring applications poses a challenge in testing the implementations. Verifying enhanced monitoring solutions is often based on manual tests. The manual approach introduces failures and defects into the systems. A pragmatic way is to leverage the code capabilities and develop test-driven monitoring solutions.
Monitoring as Code helps build custom tests to verify the functionality by validating against integrations and services. An automated and programmatic test suite can be developed for generalized CI/CD integrations to verify application behavior, performance, and monitoring.
Conclusion
Multiple factors impact the goal of attaining zero downtime and data loss when developing, integrating, and deploying cloud services. Lack of visibility and control over the implementations can place the enterprise at risk of delivering unreliable and insecure services. Adopting and applying Monitoring as Code capabilities with Infrastructure as Code can help enterprises build performant and trustworthy CI/CD strategies.
