Continuous Monitoring: The Big Picture
Course info
Course info
Description
To properly ensure your application is running - and running properly - you'll need to understand how continuous monitoring works. In this course, Continuous Monitoring: The Big Picture, you'll learn about continuous monitoring and how it fits into DevOps development cycles. First, you'll dive into the principles and benefits of continuous monitoring. Next, you'll explore how continuous monitoring can be used as part of an Application Performance Management system. Finally, you'll discover how continuous monitoring can improve your compliance with both regulatory and industry standards. When you're finished with this course, you'll be ready to make the software and system choices to help you fully integrate continuous monitoring into your application management process.
About the author
David taught high school for twenty years, worked as a Linux system administrator for five years, and has been writing since he could hold a crayon between his fingers. His childhood bedroom wall has since been repainted.
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Section Introduction Transcripts
Course Overview
If your application isn't available or running properly, then it isn't going to generate all that much revenue for your company, and if you're not constantly monitoring its performance, there's really no way to know what it's doing, at least before the customer complaints start pouring in. Adding industry-standard monitoring protocols to your team's workflow can bring you into regulatory compliance, make your product more reliable, and perhaps most exciting, compliment all those efficiency gains you hope to realize through adopting DevOps systems. Customer feedback for your company's web-based application has been just great, whenever the thing is actually running, and you've just discovered that there's a whole world of regulatory compliance out there that has yet to touch your infrastructure. You've got some serious research and work ahead of you to improve your DevOps and company protocols, but you don't know where to begin. In Continuous Monitoring: The Big Picture, I'll introduce you to the principles and benefits of continuous monitoring and application performance management. I won't go into specific technologies, but I will talk about the various classes of software tools that exist so you'll be ready to make the smart decisions it'll take to keep your application functioning at the top of its game.
Understanding Continuous Monitoring Categories
Welcome back. This module will be all about the practice of continuous monitoring, meaning a step-by-step description of the core goals for your monitoring and the things you'll do to achieve them. As I mentioned earlier, we won't talk about any specific tools, and even a general discussion of the various classes of tools will have to wait until the final module, but I will present a kind of functional mind map of the process. I suppose all that does sound a bit abstract, but don't worry, it's not as bad as all that. We'll begin by talking about how to build a clear picture of the problem. In other words, what are you afraid might happen or might already have happened to your application infrastructure that has you worried? Knowing exactly the kinds of the things that can go wrong will inform the way you work to prevent them. Then I'll introduce you to Application Performance Management, or as it's sometimes called, Applications Performance Monitoring, which is an important framework that can help guide you towards an intelligent and holistic implementation of monitoring. We'll see that APM functionality is usually divided into two complimentary monitoring modes, active, or synthetic, and passive. Finally, we'll talk about monitoring your infrastructure environment. After all, no matter how smoothly your application itself might be running, if the servers or network connectivity falls over, you won't earn too many positive user or supervisor reviews. I don't know about you, but I'm ready to get started.