How can you monitor your application deployment process?

Monitoring an application deployment process allows an organization to effectively track the performance of the application, pinpoint and analyze areas for potential improvement, anticipate possible disruptions, and promptly address issues in the event of an outage.

Monitoring ensures a hit deployment, identifies bottlenecks, and improves reliability and user delight by minimizing downtime and deployment-associated issues.

As hard as we try to think of all the details related to a deployment, things can and will go wrong. I have seen firsthand how a botched deployment can take down a large-scale e-commerce application losing the organization significant revenue in 20 minutes. We are talking tens of thousands of pending orders all GONE. This affects the bottom line and customer perception. Because of the risk, monitoring a deployment is very important and playbooks and rollback plans are crucial.

In my experience: Ensures Stability: Monitoring the application deployment process ensures stability by identifying issues before they affect users. Early Issue Detection: It allows early detection of errors or bugs, preventing them from escalating into major problems. Performance Optimization: Monitoring helps optimize performance, ensuring the application runs smoothly and efficiently. User Experience Enhancement: By tracking deployment metrics, you can enhance the overall user experience and satisfaction. Resource Utilization: Monitoring helps in efficient resource utilization, avoiding unnecessary downtime or overloading of servers.

In the application deployment process, several critical metrics are taken into consideration as mentioned below: Possible errors: These are anticipated errors for which a workaround is already in place to ensure a smooth deployment. Server load and CPU usage: Even a slight modification in the application code can impact the scalability of the server and CPU usage, thereby influencing the overall performance of the application. Web traffic: High traffic can result in prolonged loading times for the application or, in some cases, lead to pages not loading at all. Monitoring and managing web traffic are crucial aspects of the deployment process to uphold optimal performance.

Key metrics encompass deployment frequency, achievement/failure costs, rollback occurrences, software overall performance pre and put up-deployment, and consumer effect.

The application deployment process can be executed through the Configuration Manager console, where the console provides visibility into the deployment status of applications. The various statuses include: Success In progress Unknown Requirements not met Error For detailed information on failures, it is accessible through the available options. Further analysis is conducted based on the received status post-deployment. Certain tools such as like New Relic, Datadog, Jenkins, Ansible, or Kubernetes offer built-in features or plugins designed to log, track, and report on the entire deployment process.

Implement equipment that integrate together with your CI/CD pipeline to mechanically track deployments and alert on disasters or overall performance degradation.

Analyze monitoring data to identify trends, streamline processes, automate operations as much as possible, and adopt best practices for continuous improvement.

Start with important metrics that directly affect user experience and trust. Use tools that match your deployment tools for easy integration.

Consider taking action on the information that comes out of the log and APM data analysis. Create tickets, prioritize them, and fold some of these actionable tickets into upcoming sprints. Chip away as time and resources allow.