Application monitoring: What devops can do better

Many devops teams focus on implementing CI/CD pipelines, automating regression testing, configuring the infrastructure as code, and containerizing the application runtime environments. Collectively, these practices and technologies help organizations deploy applications more frequently and reduce the errors from manual steps and configurations.

But many businesses want more and expectSaaS-like performance from their applications. This isn’t just about how reliable the application (that is, how many 9s of uptime) is or its response time. Those are just the table stakes for monitoring applications. More businesses are using technologies in strategic ways where user issues can affect revenue or operations.

That desire drives a whole new set of monitoring considerations around applications. Knowing that the web server is responding, that a microservice has millisecond response times, and that database query performance meets SLAs is no longer sufficient.

Think about the last time you flew on an airplane. We all expect to land safely and are angered if there are flight delays or issues with our luggage. Going deeper, we’re hoping for a better experience from the time we walk into the airport: How long does it take to get through security? How pleasant is the waiting areas and can we find something to eat? Is boarding the airplane seamless? Is the inflight entertainment and Wi-Fi working properly?

Then think about what happens if something goes wrong. If there are delays, how accurate and efficient is the airline in communicating status and flight options to you? If the inflight entertainment isn’t working, can they fix the issue while onboard and quickly so you can watch a movie? You consider all these things when answering the question “How was your flight?”