Incident reports may originate from end users or can be triggered by monitoring systems. DevOps already focuses on continuous monitoring and automation, so setting up monitoring systems to catch incidents early is a natural fit for DevOps teams. Early detection helps organizations prevent a lower severity issue from becoming a widespread outage that affects end users.

Choosing the best monitoring and incident management tools for your environment can improve outcomes and keep end users happier. You can even automate corrective and preventative actions based on patterns.

Automated monitoring tools can collect logs and aggregate data from various inputs to provide intelligence around a reported incident. This helps operations and developers determine the cause and deploy a fix much more quickly. Monitoring and reporting software can send Incidents to the right team based on context and routing rules.

For incidents in Production, an end user ticket may be the first report of a new bug or issue. Keeping close collaboration with the Service Desk can help improve monitoring tools and testing processes to prevent similar errors from going undetected in the future.

DevOps teams should continuously monitor the supply chain, including open source components and libraries, to avoid issues like the Solarwinds hack. Monitoring releases and dependent systems, change management, hardware alerts, and more. However, the alerts sent to humans must strike a balance between missing issues and false positives that can desensitize teams to alerts and reduce productivity.

Tools

Here are a few of the Incident Management tools ReleaseTeam’s experts can help your organization implement:

• Atlassian Opsgenie – modern Incident Management
• Jira – issue tracking
• StatusPage – Incident communication
• Atlassian Fisheye – search, monitor, and track across repositories
• JFrog Xray – scan DevOps pipeline for security vulnerabilities

Summary

DevOps teams are indispensable in monitoring their projects and dependencies for vulnerabilities and unexpected behavior that may indicate an Incident. Because DevOps teams move very quickly with a large number of releases, the best way to detect possible Incidents before they affect customers and end users is through automated monitoring and deep integrations with incident management tool suites.