The DevOps Handbook – The Technical Practices of Feedback

It’s all about telemetry and feedback as we continue learning from The DevOps Handbook, while Joe knows his versions, Michael might have gone crazy if he didn’t find it, and Allen has more than enough muscles.

For those that use their podcast player to read these show notes, did you know that you can find them at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode138? Well, you can. And now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

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The Second Way: The Principles of Feedback

Implementing the technical practices of the Second Way

• Provides fast and continuous feedback from operations to development.
• Allows us to find and fix problems earlier on the software development life cycle.

Create Telemetry to Enable Seeing and Solving Problems

• Identifying what causes problems can be difficult to pinpoint: was it the code, was it networking, was it something else?
• Use a disciplined approach to identifying the problems, don’t just reboot servers.
• The only way to do this effectively is to always be generating telemetry.
  • Needs to be in our applications and deployment pipelines.
  • More metrics provide the confidence to change things.
• Companies that track telemetry are 168 times faster at resolving incidents than companies that don’t, per the 2015 State of DevOps Report (Puppet).
  • The two things that contributed to this increased MTTR ability was operations using source control and proactive monitoring (i.e. telemetry).

Create Centralized Telemetry Infrastructure

• Must create a comprehensive set of telemetry from application metrics to operational metrics so you can see how the system operates as a whole.
  • Data collection at the business logic, application, and environmental layers via events, logs and metrics.
  • Event router that stores events and metrics.
    • This enables visualization, trending, alerting, and anomaly detection.
    • Transforms logs into metrics, grouping by known elements.
  • Need to collect telemetry from our deployment pipelines, for metrics like:
    • How many unit tests failed?
    • How long it takes to bu