Performance Monitoring & Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

As consumers and internal users depend on online applications to fulfil their business needs, an organization’s success becomes directly proportional to its application performance. Hence, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is critical for every organization to deliver and maintain a top-level user experience. Application Performance Monitoring provides fuller visibility into applications, finds & fixes issues, and improves overall performance. APM enables organizations to predict and prevent performance issues before they impact end users.

Software issues may impact production users and even lead to application downtime. The situation may get worse when applications are monitored manually (and 24×7 monitoring is not feasible). The resulting downtime (or effective downtime) for users is much too common and results in user escalations across many service desk tickets.

Monitoring the performance of huge data applications is as important as monitoring any database. It is a critical component of all database administration.

Companies with huge data technology have an IT-operations responsibility to deploy and support a cohesive monitoring strategy to avoid performance degradation. Failure to monitor can lead to big crashes and impact the company’s ability to purchase products or services. Thus, monitoring applications on a real-time basis is imperative.

Automatic monitoring services give companies visibility into what is happening and prevent disruptions before they happen. Over time, such monitoring can help reveal patterns, such as whether an application is shutting down at fixed intervals or if an ERP environment is functioning sub-optimally. When such patterns emerge, pre-emptively preventing IT downtime and stabilizing the IT ecosystem becomes possible.

The key benefits of automatic infrastructure application monitoring include:

1. Stopping downtime before it occurs.
2. Deploying rapid solutions during downtime.
3. Ensuring a hiccup-free integration between systems.
4. Keeping IT administration and support constantly on track.

The market is flooded with commercial and open-source performance monitoring tools with various features. Selecting the monitoring tool is your first step in getting an improved ROI, and the best way to start performance monitoring is with an open-source tool. It helps the organization to recognize whether the tool will meet its monitoring expectations.

Some features like alerting, real-time mobile notifications, automatic incident creation, and automatic issue-based reactive actions are unavailable on standard monitoring tools. These monitoring needs gave birth to a new concept called Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). SRE relies on a more than a century-old management principle that the people who create something should be equally responsible for ensuring its continued success. Traditionally, operation tasks don’t scale well when they rely too heavily on manual actions. SRE teams automate tedious, simple, and complex manual tasks. Usually, systems go down because we need to release new features or because the system infrastructure runs out of capacity. The latter can be dealt with through automation.

Site reliability engineering mainly focuses on automation and observability. It is a way to bridge the gap between developers and IT operations, even in a DevOps culture. For instance, it isn’t SRE versus DevOps but SRE with DevOps. SRE is effectively a more proactive form of quality engineering. Site reliability engineers are dedicated full-time to creating software that improves the reliability of systems in production, including:

1. Filling gaps between Dev and Ops
2. Ensuring reliability
3. Observing what matters
4. Eliminating large manual workforces
5. Being pro-active

Site reliability engineers play a crucial role in continuous improvement with regard to people, processes, and technology within an organization. Whether your team already has SRE or whether you are considering adopting it, SRE offers multiple benefits like application performance and reliability. It starts with understanding the application and the process whereby the application is built.  It then drives interaction between the development and operations teams to make the software more reliable and improve user experience.

Summary

Monitoring and SRE are hot topics today. They are practiced in many organizations regardless of their industry and at different levels of digital transformation. Several companies like LinkedIn, Twitter, Zalando, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple have been paving the way by sharing their experiences and best practices. Furthermore, the evolution of SRE becomes more interesting as it grows in organizations from a few engineers to an entire organizational culture shift.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Vikas Shukla
Director – Quality Engineering
Celsior

Himanshu Gosain
Senior QE Architect
Celsior

Read other blogs of the series to get more insights on Quality Engineering, QE services, and QE Automation.

Moving from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering
Test Automation – Getting the most out of open-source
Adding AI capabilities to a Test Automation Framework
Mobile Test Automation – How to get the most bang for your buck
ETL Data Validation – Better decision making through improved data quality
Role of Quality Engineering within DevOps and CI/CD