5 Reasons Network Monitoring is a DevOps Strategy

DevOps is a corporate strategy. DevOps is a culture.

DevOps is about communication between Developers, Operations, and the needs of business units.

There is no shortage of strategies to implement DevOps within organizations. You can begin with agile development practices and end with application monitoring. This is where our discussion is headed. How monitoring, and more specifically, network monitoring is a DevOps strategy. Network monitoring should be in your DevOps Strategy.

5 reasons monitoring needs to be in your DevOps strategy are:

Reason 1 — You have limited bandwidth

Within an organization, bandwidth can be a hot commodity. This means either your local network for distributing application updates, or delivering content to your customers and users. If there is no defined monitoring strategy, there is no way to know bandwidth utilization.

Limited bandwidth is an issue, and if you understand your usage, an optimization strategycan be implemented. Ultimately, this will improve network and application performance.

Reason 2 — Make informed decisions

Monitoring provides your DevOps team with the ability to understand the whole picture. Understanding the organizations network usage will provide the ability to make objective decisions about release times, traffic routing, and pricing considerations. Monitoring is about collecting real-time data and making real-time decisions.

Reason 3 — Report and troubleshoot

Analysis and decision making are the primary reasons for monitoring. In a network monitoring strategy, the ability to run reports is necessary. Running reports on network performance, looking at latency times, bandwidth usage, and transit costs, all make for better business decisions. Analysis of compiled reports is what allows this to happen.

Reports also provide the ability to troubleshoot problems. With graphical and statistical analysis, troubleshooting network issues becomes significantly easier, as well as less time consuming.

Reason 4 — Ensure uptime

Understanding network requirements can ensure ample network requirements are met, as well as the network is optimized. Translated, this means that application uptime is increased. By running a network optimally, an organization can ensure the bandwidth and network requirements are met to run applications. Also, by implementing a monitoring strategy, network adjustments can be made to coordinate with application uptime and application network usage.

Reason 5 — Build better software

The whole point of DevOps is to create better software and run a better technical environment. Therefore, when building software, an understanding of the network is essential. This will allow the development team to build software which is designed to run optimally on your organizations network. This means deployments and how the application runs has the networks latency and bandwidth built in.

DevOps is an important organizational concept. It does not start and stop with the software development team. The role of operations and their ability to implement an effective network monitoring strategy has a huge impact on the building of great software.

Article originally published on the Datapath.io Blog.