What is Telemetry and Monitoring in DevOps- StarAgile

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Telemetry and monitoring both work in coordination. They help the DevOps team identify errors in the production process of software applications. By analysing logs and metric data, DevOps engineers evaluate different areas of the software development process. They include usage patterns, bugs, room for improvement, system performance, and security issues in the application.

To ensure that an application meets an SLA of 99.99 percent, meaning that they have significantly fewer chances of facing any outages, one must apply monitoring and telemetry extensively. Telemetry DevOps is a significant portion of DevOps training. Therefore, one should be aware of the telemetry vs monitoring analogy to achieve a perfect product development cycle.

What is the Difference Between Monitoring and Telemetry?

One can take the case of motor racing to understand the difference between telemetry and monitoring. In a motor race, fans see metrics such as G-forces, top speed, race position, lap times, and other relevant data about the race on giant TV screens. These measurement displays that one gets to see on screen are called telemetry.

Conversely, the entire process of installation of sensors in the vehicles, data extraction, and then relaying the information on a particular set of metrics to the display screens like giant TVs screen that fans see is called monitoring.

In DevOps, the most common metric deals with the performance and the health of a software application. Various corresponding metrics related to health and performance are also included. They are visible on the dashboard.

Let's discuss each process in detail to understand the telemetry vs monitoring analogy better.

Understanding Monitoring

Monitoring is a process in which DevOps engineers collect logs and metric data to oversee the application's performance during its development process. Different methods that include monitoring are meant to achieve the following:

Make alerts based on some defined criteria
To create a visual representation of the application's performance based on key parameters
Procurement of a specific log data stream

Primary Goals of Monitoring in DevOps

Monitoring is emphasized in DevOps online training because it helps the team achieve crucial milestones in the software production process. Some of the primary goals that monitoring seeks to achieve are as follows:

It ensures the high availability of an application by minimising the critical metrics of monitoring measured in terms of time. These metrics are the time to mitigate, time to detect, and time to remediate.
Monitoring tools aim to find incidents of network breaches in the infrastructure of an application.
It can also help understand how a specific app component behaves under a given condition during production. The DevOps engineers can allocate resources to handle such workload demands with this information.
Monitoring is also vital in identifying the user and market behaviour, which eventually helps the software development team improve the SLA performance.
One of the main goals of monitoring is to enable validated learning. Validated learning is a process by which product development teams track the results of the developed application. They check if it aligns with the hypothesis that the DevOps team laid down in the product planning process.

Understanding Telemetry

Telemetry is regarded as the subset of monitoring. It is the mechanism with which the data provided by the monitoring tools and methodology are represented. Telemetry uses some primary agents which are installed in the deployment environments. These agents can be software development kit that collects data from markers embedded in the source code. Telemetry has two major components:

Recording the telemetry metrics - This is the component where the data collected using monitoring is recorded. Most DevOps organisations register data based on different metrics at every layer of their applications and in the product deployment pipeline.
Platform to manage collected telemetry metrics - This platform visualises data. Furthermore, the platform is also used for sampling, trending, alerting, and anomaly detection. Various events in the product deployment pipeline are recorded in the same telemetry infrastructure. These events are rollbacks, commits, installations, automated test results, uninstallation, and pre-production environments.

Types of Telemetry Metrics

Telemetry DevOps is based on various telemetry metrics. They can be classified into the following five categories:

Application layer metrics - These include the time of transactions, the response time of applications, and the number of fatal exceptions and core dumps in an application.
Client layer metrics - Client application response time, client errors on the mobile, webpage, or any other client applications are some of the client layer metrics.
Infrastructure layer metrics - These include metrics such as disk I/O and network I/O operations, CPU, RAM, and storage usage.
Deployment pipeline layer metrics - The check-ins, frequencies, deployment lead times, results after execution of automated results, and the status of environments where the software is deployed are some of the deployment pipeline layer metrics.
Business layer metrics - Results of A/B testing, revenue, profit, number of new users, durations of each session, and the number of completed orders and abandoned checkouts are some examples of business layer metrics.

From the above discussion, one must clearly understand the differences between telemetry and monitoring. Both of these operations are taught during DevOps online training. There are many fields, such as analysing the health of source code, anomaly detection, and testing performance, where telemetry and monitoring are used together.

To excel in these two methods and improve their software's SLA performance, take the DevOps Course by StarAgile. Through this course, you can master the important concepts of DevOps under the supervision of experienced faculty. The DevOps Training provided by StarAgile is aligned with industry standards to offer the best learning modules and practice insights. With this training, you can find placement opportunities in various industries.

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