Understanding continuous monitoring in DevOps
The fifth practice of DevOps that we introduced in the opening chapter of this book is Continuous Monitoring (CM). CM involves two main tasks – gathering user feedback and collecting real-time telemetry data. User feedback is used to set future priorities. Telemetry data is used to quickly detect and address operational issues, reduce downtime, and uphold service reliability and availability.
To achieve this, CM relies on monitoring tools for data collection across applications, infrastructure, and networks. In Azure, Application Insights is a key service for CM. It has similar Application Performance Management (APM) capabilities to Dynatrace and Datadog APM. It can be used to collect data from running applications, using either a codeless or code-based approach. This data can then be analyzed to offer insights into application health, live metrics, transaction searches, and user behavior (Figure 8.1).