Jamie Wallis

9 September 2020

Why you should embed monitoring earlier in your Database DevOps cycle

As Gartner recommends in their report ‘Fail Fast in Production; Embed Monitoring Earlier in Your DevOps Cycle’¹, it has been shown that it’s possible to provide superior customer experiences by building “instrumentation into the preproduction phase, tracking metrics on availability, performance and service health”.

While this particular report focuses on application monitoring, the benefits of tracking, and acting on, key metrics early in the DevOps process can apply equally to database monitoring.

During the building and testing phase of database development, it is not only possible to provide realistic, yet compliant test data but to monitor those servers to give early indications of any performance impact their updates may bring.

By empowering teams to own database performance on non-production servers, you ensure QA takes place much earlier in the development process, and issues can be ironed out long before they hit production.

This in turn means teams can manage deployments faster and more frequently, and optimize for agility and performance.

To help embed monitoring earlier in the Database DevOps cycle, automating actions from deployment problems, even on non-production environments, can help with benchmarking for performance expectations. It can then be used to raise alerts should abnormal metrics be detected following an update.

By connecting your database monitoring tool to your tech stack, it can read and report on deployments made to any server on your estate, and then automatically deliver an alert back to the development team to let them know what happened and how to fix any issues.

This continuous feedback loop not only reduces time spent manually checking for problems, but speeds up communication between database development and operational teams. Most importantly, this activity all takes place on non-production environments, meaning fewer bad customer experiences when accessing production data.

With both development and administration teams accessing monitoring data throughout the build and deployment process, you will empower them to own key performance metrics and work on a continuous improvement plan.

The data available within a monitoring solution allows teams to proactively seek to improve processes and customer experiences, and there is also the opportunity to introduce business-level metrics so they can directly see the impact their work is having.

Through this the collaborative nature of Database DevOps can be embraced, while speed and compliance can be easily maintained.

Get your copy of Gartner’s report ‘Don’t Fail Fast in Production; Embed Monitoring Earlier in Your DevOps Cycle’ now, and if you are ready to embed monitoring earlier in your Database DevOps cycle take a look at SQL Monitor.

1. Don’t Fail Fast in Production; Embed Monitoring Earlier in Your DevOps Cycle, Pankaj Prasad, George Spafford, Charley Rich, 16 July 2019.