Developer’s Handbook for Infrastructure Monitoring

In 2017, Amazon faced an unfortunate four-hour outage, causing S&P 500 companies to lose $150 million. What was the cause? An erroneous command removed more servers than intended, causing system downtime. Although downtime is not an alien topic for developers, its impact can be deeply felt. Gartner estimates the average cost of downtime to be as high as $5600 per minute, which may build up to over $300k per hour. These are definitely scary numbers for any organization.

But there's no need to panic just yet!

Taking a few proactive and calculated steps can minimize the impact of downtime. A list of best practices for achieving this can include reviewing the test server backups, infrastructure maintenance, regular monitoring, and maintaining the stability and security of your devices.

Monitoring as a development practice is essential, not just for preventing downtimes. It gives deeper insights to developers to better understand the infrastructure and take impromptu action during the hour of need!

There are three major types of DevOps monitoring; Infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, and network monitoring. In this blog, we will talk in detail about Infrastructure monitoring, its use cases, and best practices. But first, let’s start with a basic overview of infrastructural monitoring.

Infrastructure Monitoring: An Overview

An organization that relies on Information Technology for delivering its products and services requires setting up and maintaining an IT infrastructure. This infrastructure includes networks, servers, computer hardware/software, data centers, and storage. By monitoring the IT infrastructure, you can collect and examine information obtained from it and use the data to enhance final outcomes. It includes monitoring hardware, application, OS, and the network. Popular infrastructure monitoring tools include Prometheus, ManegeEngine, and Solarwinds. In simple terms, infrastructure monitoring ensures that organizations have the following:

• The ability to optimize business processes by offering a splendid user experience.
• Prior detection and alert on outages and performance degradation.
• Offers scalability to handle planned and unplanned traffic spikes.

Infrastructure Monitoring Use Cases

This branch of DevOps monitoring ensures that developers can rely on it for spotting and minimizing downtime and user service degradation. Typically, infrastructure monitoring helps organizations by:

Troubleshooting Performance Issues

You can leverage infrastructure monitoring to prevent service outages from escalating. An infrastructure monitoring tool can give detailed insights showing which host, container, or component has failed. This will significantly reduce the turnaround time in issue resolution.

Optimize Infrastructure Use

Optimizing your existing infrastructure using an infrastructure tool may help you financially. For example, if some of your servers are idle, you can eliminate them and distribute the workload on the remaining servers.

Forecast Backend Requirements

By reviewing past infrastructural metrics, infrastructure monitoring tools can predict future resource requirements for optimal performance by reviewing past infrastructural metrics. This is beneficial as you can plan out your finances in advance. 

Features That Developers Crave to Have In Infrastructure Monitoring Tools

It is true that there is no tool in the market that is a universal fit for every organization. However, every tool must have certain essential features that will complement its other existing features. So, while choosing your infrastructure monitoring tool, look out for these particular features in them:

Cloud Compatible

If not today, then definitively tomorrow, you are going to switch to the cloud. Therefore, it is mandatory to pick a DevOps monitoring tool that is cloud compatible. 

Autoscaling Supportive 

Autoscaling support is needed as when you will scale and put newer machines on the rack, they will start collecting data from the backend as they come online. So there won't be any need for added manual configuration. 

Customizable Alerts

Every infrastructure monitoring tool is designed to alert you when a key metric goes above or below a certain threshold. It is advisable to pick a monitoring tool that leverages machine learning to alert teammates when the latency rate is about to spike. This can help you sort out the issue even before it causes any harm.

Visualizations 

Nothing is wrong with having the most intuitive and user-friendly predefined dashboard. However, it is even cooler to make customized dashboards to monitor the health and performance of your hosts and containers. 

Unified Platform  

Last but not least, you need to identify a monitoring tool that offers the feasibility of seamless integration between infrastructure metrics and other related traces, logs, and events. 

Machine Learning 

Any tool based on machine learning analyzes historical performance to detect anomalies. By leveraging machine learning, you don't have to manually set alerts for every possible failure. Such tools are also capable of forecasting CPU usage, memory usage, and other resources based on historical analysis.

Best Practices for Infrastructure Monitoring

Leverage Automation 

Take advantage of automation as much as possible. Boost your productivity by augmenting your capabilities using automation. This will help you gain end-to-end observability. 

Prioritize Alerts 

Build a habit of organizations and set notifications for the most important alerts based on priority. 

Create Role-Specific Dashboards  

Infrastructure monitoring tools give you the accessibility to create custom dashboards as per your needs. For example, you need to create boards based on various teams working in your organization. This will benefit them in monitoring their KPIs. 

Regularly Review Metrics

As your business grows, your infrastructure will evolve, and your business goals will change with time. This will also change the metrics and KPIs you need to track. Therefore, it's crucial to review them at regular intervals to avoid developing any blindspots across your infrastructure. 

Do a Test Run  

No one likes to be alerted by a false alarm. That's why before relying on an infrastructure monitoring tool on a day-to-day basis, it is good to perform a test run to witness if everything is working as expected. 

Conclusion

Performance and optimization have become crucial factors for monitoring any IT infrastructure. As such, observability of performance is considered crucial. This can only be achieved through smart investment in infrastructure monitoring tools. I hope this blog guides you in taking the final step toward infrastructure monitoring. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the same, feel free to contact me in the comments section below.