DevOps Practices - Monitoring and Logging

DevOps Practices - Monitoring and Logging

The rise of interconnected data distributed across various IT systems is one of the most significant shifts of this decade. This growth disrupted traditional DevOps and ITOps practices.

Infrastructure monitoring is one of the crucial aspects of running production applications. The concept of observability is essential for enabling successful deployments - not only in production but also in the early stages of your continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. Event and log data in your CI/CD pipeline helps developers monitor and observe application behavior before the actual production release.

The quickly evolving technology landscape has increased the need for log management and observability across distributed systems and containers. Changes to how modern applications and services are designed, along with the capacity to build services using various development languages, have increased the need to collect, monitor, and trace data points across connected systems.

Many consider log management a tedious task; each server instance requires you to run a search command across the logs on that server instance. This approach becomes problematic when you have a cluster of more than 20 servers, and each application has independent logging formats. The administrator needs to run 20 individual queries across 20 different servers, compare timestamps across servers residing in different time zones, and so forth.

A log aggregation system reduces the element of 'personalization' that happens when developers use different technologies with various logging formats and also reduces the noise by filtering out information that delays the team’s ability to find the source issue.

The 3 Pillars of Observability

The three pillars of observability are critical for DevOps to provide elastic and resilient services.

• External Monitoring: helps check the health of your internal, external applications, and websites to check the “digital experience” of your users.
• Metrics and Distributed Tracing: helps trace communications between applications distributed across systems/containers to identify errors and exceptions from your apps quickly.
• Events and Logs: is the data that helps provide contextual information about events; it enables you to identify issues in the code when combined with information from the first two pillars.

AWS Monitoring and Logging Tools

Amazon CloudWatch - Cloud and Network Monitoring

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing you with a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers.

CloudWatch can detect unusual behavior in your environments, set alarms, visualize logs and metrics side by side, take automated actions, troubleshoot issues, and discover insights to keep your applications running smoothly.

AWS X-Ray - Distributed Tracing

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With X-Ray, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. X-Ray provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and shows a map of your application’s underlying components. You can use X-Ray to analyze both applications in development and in production, from simple three-tier applications to complex microservices applications consisting of thousands of services.

AWS CloudTrail - Activity & API Usage Tracking

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This event history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting. In addition, you can use CloudTrail to detect unusual activity in your AWS accounts. These capabilities help simplify operational analysis and troubleshooting.

Conclusion

Monitoring and logging help you track your data distributed across various IT systems. It is a crucial part of every successful deployment. AWS monitoring and logging tools help you establish efficient monitoring procedures.

Sedmi odjel is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and Solution Provider specializing in the implementation of AWS solutions and services.

As a company that works with a lot of software companies, we understand the whole development lifecycle and how DevOps model and tools can help your company become more productive and competitive.

If you have any question about DevOps tools:

• visit our dedicated DevOps page
• give us a call at +43 664 255 88 55
• contact our sales department at sales@heptabit.at

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