Continuous Monitoring: Everything you need to know

What is Continuous Monitoring in DevOps?

Continuous monitoring helps companies review and monitor their processes for identifying any security risks and non-adherence to standard performances throughout the DevOps lifecycle. The biggest benefit of Continuous Monitoring is it helps solve the issues in real-time and gives relevant insights to the developers. Also known as Continuous Control Monitoring (CCM), this process improves the security throughout the company operations as well as the health of your IT infrastructure.

Types of Continuous Monitoring in DevOps

Companies usually check certain metrics to detect the risks and mitigate them in order to prevent any infrastructure or operations issues. To implement such security checks, companies monitor error codes, server-related issues or customer activities, etc. Here are some of the monitoring types that are typically conducted to ensure security threats stay at bay.

What are the benefits of Continuous Monitoring?

Continuous monitoring enables companies to keep a check on their networks, applications, softwares, and other infrastructure. Since it provides critical data in real-time, it helps organizations in taking critical risk management decisions. There are ample benefits that continuous monitoring delivers. Some of them are mentioned below:

Risk management with continuous monitoring in DevOps

Continuous monitoring plays a vital role in the Risk Management Framework (RMF). For the authorization of systems and ongoing assessments, RMF depends on Continuous Monitoring. For holistic risk management, Continuous Monitoring tools must be selected only after the risk management plan is in place.

It is essential to understand the level of damage an organization can resist, which factors have high-value risk, to what level the confidentiality of data must be maintained, or how security breaches or software and hardware issues can affect the organization.

Best practices to implement continuous monitoring

Just like continuous integration and continuous development, Continuous Monitoring is also a part of the DevOps lifecycle. It enables organizations to offer healthy, high-performing, and reliable applications as it continuously moves from developers to production to customers. However, to implement continuous monitoring it is necessary to take measures which are as follows:

1. Enable web applications and services monitoring for complete observation.
2. Monitor all relevant components of infrastructure like servers, security, networks, performance, etc.
3. Maintain separate instances for monitoring multiple deployment environments in order to maintain data relevancy across all platforms, be it apps or infrastructure.
4. Prepare workbooks with metric charts, log queries of guides for troubleshooting basic problems.
5. Configure actionable alerts for any possible issues or failures.

Best DevOps tools for continuous monitoring

Here are some of the most popular and highly rated DevOps continuous monitoring tools that provide accurate risk alerts:

Conclusion

Though none of the systems are 100% safe, incorporating continuous monitoring reduces that risk by 97%. Continuous monitoring helps you understand business objectives which can then help determine the correct continuous monitoring solutions for your business requirements. Therefore, in order to implement CM effectively, ensure that the correct monitoring tools are used and the best practices are followed diligently.