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Monitoring as Code (MaC) is a modern concept getting wider adoption in software development.
In these processes, software building teams must also integrate monitoring throughout the software development process.
Thats where MaC becomes useful.
Incorporating MaC solutions likeChecklyin the software development process can bring many benefits to software developers and DevOps teams.
In this article, Ill discuss what MaC is in detail and how it can help you.
What Is Monitoring as Code?
MaC is an EaC concept, infrastructure as code (IaC) to be precise.
It does so by deploying monitors and services in the IT environment.
These solutions will make monitoring effortless, faster, and more reliable.
MaC vs.
Traditional Monitoring
Traditional monitoring is different from monitoring as code.
MaC involves the complete observability lifecycle from automated alerting and incident management to automated diagnosis.
TheSDLCinvolves stages planning, coding, building, testing, releasing, deploying, operations, and monitoring.
In MaC, teams need to gain deeper metrics and insights throughout the software development lifecycle.
MaC incorporates data collection for business-critical key performance indicators (KPIs).
It covers the entire observability cycle, including alerts, troubleshooting, and diagnosis.
This can be done by creating automation scripts to get to monitor code functions.
In practice, a software team builds a web app and releases it to the public.
They require instant monitoring.
These tools and services could be CI/CD pipelines, certificate management tools, etc.
After the integration, you might quickly start iterating on the monitoring code thats versioned.
This will help unify the development, security, and IT teams on a given workflow.
It also automates deployments and provides better scalability and visibility.
This can include monitoring scripts, API endpoints, exporters, metric-fetching tools, and more.
This enables increased adoption of MaC across different business units.
#4.Innovation
You will need to terminate the EaC loop in the software lifecycle.
As a result, the IT, development, and security teams can easily collaborate with each other.
This way, they can leverage a unified workflow and work on improving the core business.
So, lets first take a look at various challenges associated with traditional monitoring.
Suppose, the operations team detects a security threat, they will notify teams to take immediate action.
The system may get infiltrated, and information can get leaked.
This is why teams must be coordinated well and have smooth communication between the members.
MaC helps here by unifying teams and members with a shared workflow.
Everyone will be kept in a loop so that nothing can be missed.
#2.Manual Monitoring
Traditional monitoring involves manual monitoring.
it’s crucial that you create monitors manually using a tool.
And each member of a team would have to manage their monitors separately.
Accuracy remains a question in this practice.
All would work without any guidelines, best practices, change history, and peer review.
Besides, its tough to manage a large number of monitors manually.
In addition, with the growth of teams, this practice is not scalable.
However, MaC has the capability to solve these issues.
And if you are a software development company, you would never want this mismatch to happen.
With the help of MaC, the source code of your core monitoring will be written as code.
This means the check definition comes closer to the source code.
As a result of this, visibility gets enhanced throughout the team.
This enables an easier way to roll back any change if needed.
Alternatively, they may request permissions so that they can become capable of applying changes.
This means IT teams must work through various flows and UIs.
As a result, maintaining consistency and simultaneously avoiding effort duplication becomes difficult across the infrastructure.
It may even complicate auditing changes and make it challenging to review monitoring checks that are configured incorrectly.
This also increases the length of the feedback loop and makes collaboration between teams harder.
This boosts consistency and increases transparency between each team member.
This, in turn, enhances collaboration among team members.
MaC solutions likeChecklyare excellent ways to implement MaC in your software development workflow and achieve better results.
Benefits of MaC
#1.Version Control
In traditional monitoring, its difficult to track changes.
Everyone in the team has a separate monitor to perform the activities.
Hence, version control was a difficult task.
However, MaC provides better version control by unifying members, teams, and departments.
It aligns version control with building the software as well as its testing and deployment.
This also brings better visibility, repeatability, and reliability.
Apart from tracking changes, you’re free to easily revert to your previous tool versions.
In addition, you might even see what change has been made by whom and when.
#2.Unification
MaC helps unify fragmented processes of CI/CD workflows and stay synchronized.
In MaC, you are essentially configuring your monitors closer to the system code.
This enables you to do the needed updates while changing the code and keep it synchronized.
#3.Efficiency
Monitoring tools are manually configured through their user interface.
It can also be done by operations teams.
This is actually a slow process.
But configuring MaC lets you spin up more monitors automatically with speed.
This implies that every time you introduce a new endpoint, a corresponding endpoint will be created.
Thus, you will achieve better efficiency with the help of automation in your monitoring processes.
#4.Increased Transparency
By providing greater source control, MaC enables increased transparency among team members.
They can also perform faster and easier rollbacks if they need it.
In addition, with MaC, all the checks stay alongside the program code within the same repository.
This way, you might control and manage what to monitor, why, and by which check.
This helps team members spin up more monitors if needed, and engineering teams collaborate more.
#5.Better Scalability
MaC offers better scalability by making provisioning more effective and faster.
So, when your team size or user base grows, you dont face trouble scaling up your resources.
And if you’re gonna wanna scale down, this is also easy.
This will be helpful during audits.
you’ve got the option to also use MaC solutions likeChecklyto develop and run software faster with reliability.
You may also explore some bestremote monitoring and management softwarefor SMBs.
