The Best Way for Dev and Ops to Collaborate - Part 7
November 16, 2017

DEVOPSdigest asked experts from across the industry – including consultants, analysts, organizations, users and the leading vendors – for their opinions on the best way to foster collaboration between Dev and Ops. Part 7, the final installment, covers IT Operations tools.

Start with The Best Way for Dev and Ops to Collaborate - Part 1

Start with The Best Way for Dev and Ops to Collaborate - Part 2

Start with The Best Way for Dev and Ops to Collaborate - Part 3

Start with The Best Way for Dev and Ops to Collaborate - Part 4

Start with The Best Way for Dev and Ops to Collaborate - Part 5

Start with The Best Way for Dev and Ops to Collaborate - Part 6

SHARED LANGUAGE AND TOOLS AROUND PERFORMANCE

It's critical for developers and operators to speak a common language about the performance of their applications. We often see DevOps teams use performance analysis tools to "greenlight" apps before they go into production. That way, developers can make sure they won't break things in production, and if operators do see issues in production, they can easily work with developers to troubleshoot using the very same tools. Having a shared language and tools around performance dramatically improves DevOps collaboration, especially when performance is complex, such as in multi-tenant Big Data systems.
Chad Carson
Co-Founder of Pepperdata

MONITORING

"CAMS" (Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing) has persisted as the DevOps mantra. A good monitoring/performance measurement strategy (a big part of the M) is key in bringing Dev and Ops teams together in solving problems at design and run time. What are attributes of a good monitoring strategy: 1. Agreeable. Have a general agreement on what KPIs matter, how they should be gathered and what to do with the data. Monitoring should not be used for deflecting blame but to unite the team on common goals. 2. Accessible. All of monitoring data is at everyone's disposal. In absence of accessibility you end up with war rooms, with chieftains clinging to their weapons (monitoring silos) 3. Integrated. Every aspect of the system and application have to be built to allow measurement. Monitoring as an afterthought usually fails at scale.
Peco Karayanev
Sr. Product Manager, Riverbed

Do a Google image search for "DevOps" and you'll see dozens of models describing the components that make up a continuous delivery cycle. You'll also notice "monitoring" in all of them. The whole point of continuous delivery is that successively smaller, and therefore faster, releases reduce the amount of code change between versions. Reduced change equals reduced risk. However, as release cycles get faster they require near immediate feedback to know if the release was successful or not. In addition, development and production environments are becoming ever more dynamic, so this feedback must come from equally dynamic monitoring. Monitoring that tells both Development and IT Operations how well the service is performing and its availability profile. Baking pre-defined monitoring criteria into an application will allow Operations teams to implement accurate monitor on Day One, and provide that real-time feedback loop to their Development counterparts. Put simply: Including monitoring standards into the Development criteria for a service allows monitoring to become the feedback mechanism that makes the process continuous.
Adam Bacia
Staff Product Marketing Manager, Zenoss

APM

Leveraging Application Performance Management (APM) integrates OPS & DEV teams by seamlessly pinpointing and communicating the root cause of production issues, meaning faster time-to-resolution. APM tools allow your OPS & DEV teams to effectively speak the same language when it comes to production issues in the wild. Being able to drill down further into application issues allows OPS to identify the root cause of errors and communicate those directly to DEV teams.
Doug McAfee
Solution Engineer, Apica

NETWORK MANAGEMENT TOOLS

With the growth of cloud computing and software-defined networking, it's increasingly important for development and network teams to work closely together. Whether it's troubleshooting slow applications or optimizing the network to support new ways of application access, breaking down IT silos is a must. In fact, a recent survey at NetBrain revealed that 45 percent of network engineers cited the lack of collaboration and coordination across teams as the number one challenge when troubleshooting network problems. To overcome this challenge, critical steps include gaining end-to-end network visibility and automating knowledge-sharing across teams. When everyone has the same view of what's happening on the network and level of information at their fingertips, communication flows more quickly and a richer culture of collaboration ensues.
Grant Ho
SVP, NetBrain

Developers code and test their applications in a perfect network environment. Operations deploy and manage those applications in the production network which could include private, public or hybrid networks. It is at this point that your users discover that the application isn't usable because the production network environment is different to the developer's network. Operations blame development, developers say "it works for me" and your users are frustrated. The good news is that there is an alternative approach that helps Dev and Ops to collaborate and mitigate the risk of failure. It involves using Network Emulation technology to create a virtual test network that is repeatable and controllable and has the same characteristics of the production environment. Now, the development team can build their applications in an environment that accurately reflects the real world network enabling them to identify and resolve any networked application performance issues early in the application lifecycle, so that there are no nasty surprises when Ops take delivery.
Peter White
Operations Director, iTrinegy

Share this

Industry News

November 07, 2024

Broadcom announced the general availability of VMware Tanzu Platform 10 that establishes a new layer of abstraction across Cloud Foundry infrastructure foundations to make it easier, faster, and less expensive to bring new applications, including GenAI applications, to production.

November 07, 2024

Tricentis announced the expansion of its test management and analytics platform, Tricentis qTest, with the launch of Tricentis qTest Copilot.

November 07, 2024

Redgate is introducing two new machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) powered capabilities in its test data management and database monitoring solutions.

November 07, 2024

Upbound announced significant advancements to its platform, targeting enterprises building self-service cloud environments for their developers and machine learning engineers.

November 07, 2024

Edera announced the availability of Am I Isolated, an open source container security benchmark that probes users runtime environments and tests for container isolation.

November 06, 2024

Progress announced 10 years of partnership with emt Distribution — a leading cybersecurity distributor in the Middle East and Africa.

November 06, 2024

Port announced $35 million in Series B funding, bringing its total funding to $58M to date.

November 05, 2024

Parasoft has made another step in strategically integrating AI and ML quality enhancements where development teams need them most, such as using natural language for troubleshooting or checking code in real time.

November 05, 2024

MuleSoft announced the general availability of full lifecycle AsyncAPI support, enabling organizations to power AI agents with real-time data through seamless integration with event-driven architectures (EDAs).

November 05, 2024

Numecent announced they have expanded their Microsoft collaboration with the launch of Cloudpager's new integration to App attach in Azure Virtual Desktop.

November 04, 2024

Progress announced the completion of the acquisition of ShareFile, a business unit of Cloud Software Group, providing a SaaS-native, AI-powered, document-centric collaboration platform, focusing on industry segments including business and professional services, financial services, industrial and healthcare.

November 04, 2024

Incredibuild announced the acquisition of Garden, a provider of DevOps pipeline acceleration solutions.

October 31, 2024

The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) announced an expansion of its free course “Developing Secure Software” (LFD121).

October 31, 2024

Redgate announced that its core solutions are listed in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace.

October 30, 2024

LambdaTest introduced a suite of new features to its AI-powered Test Manager, designed to simplify and enhance the test management experience for software development and QA teams.