What is the need of DevOps Timeline?
Nothing brings more excitement to a developer than building new features for a product or entirely a new product from scratch. Developers love to build challenging things that solve real world problems and as they are the ones that have the skillset to build a solution for a business problem into an actual feature/product.
However, what pains developers is the continuous optimization efforts they have to put in managing the operational complexities associated with the cloud and DevOps. This optimization effort in most cases is an ongoing activity that they have to perform on a weekly/monthly basis and at times some priority optimization eats up a whole week completely derailing them from the software development task that they were originally doing.
DevOps engineers try to handle as much optimization. However, they need constant contribution from the whole team to make the optimization highly efficient.
In the event of unplanned downtimes, security breaches, unplanned infrastructure modifications, and other such unknown cloud events, DevOps engineers have to deep dive in reports and different monitoring dashboards to figure out the root cause of the problem that is at times of no avail due to the limited & siloed visibility. None of them shows the entire history of events in the infrastructure of an organization. This limited & distributed visibility increases the time spent by DevOps engineers in identifying the root cause of the issues (MTTR) that can have potential business impacts.
To solve this problem of siloed and delayed visibility of infrastructure events, we built DevOps Timeline – single source of truth for all cloud infrastructure activities and events that DevOps engineers can use to root cause issues faster than ever.
Building Blocks of DevOps Timeline
We talked with a lot of DevOps engineers and did our research to find out what is the current solution to this limited & siloed visibility for DevOps events. AWS has a partial solution to the problem through it’s CloudTrail service. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of your AWS account activity, including actions taken through the Management Console, SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services.
CloudTrail delivers on a lot of fronts and is a great service, but it misses out on one of the most important aspects of infrastructure optimization, cost! While optimization is primarily done for improving the performance of the system, however, in today’s cloud- first world, most of the time it is done to optimize the costs of IT, be it cloud infrastructure costs or developer tools expenses.
While DevOps timeline covers all the use cases of CloudTrail, we built DevOps Timeline keeping cost as the main value driver, and covered all such sources of infrastructure events that can have a potential cost impact. This means that DevOps Timeline covers all the DevOps activities of your organization and not just AWS events. In addition to that – we wanted to give a user experience to engineers such that it is extremely easy for them to find exhaustive information associated with any DevOps event. That is why we gave DevOps Timeline a searchable user experience.
Our approach towards building DevOps Timeline was to ingest as much data as possible from a variety of sources. We consumed log data from cloud providers, CI-CD tools, APM (like new relic and datadog), Incident Management softwares (like PagerDuty), etc. The team here at OpsLyft then worked its magic and turned all of this data to meaningful insights and developed the Search Engine for DevOps- DevOps Timeline.
Benefits for Engineering Managers & DevOps Teams
DevOps Timeline alters the effort that Engineering Managers and DevOps engineers have to put in while doing root cause analysis of their infrastructure. Since they get a culmination of all their DevOps activities at one place, they can achieve the following using this feature:
- A holistic view of their cloud infrastructure with real-time data coupled with the cost impact of each feature, project, or product.
- Ability to set customizable alerts for any type of event for quicker analysis of any surge or other suspicious activity.
- Exhaustive logging of all the DevOps activities that have happened in the infrastructure that includes the owner of a particular activity, the machine used, etc which makes it easy to pinpoint the exact reason for any cost and usage spike.
- Security in the major area where DevOps Timeline proves its usefulness. With comprehensive data of each and every DevOps activity available in a matter of minutes, finding bad agents and their remedial through insights makes the work of DevOps engineers a breeze.
How to get started with DevOps Timeline?
If you want to try DevOps Timeline yourself, just schedule a demo with us and we will give you a complete walkthrough of it and tell you more about how it can benefit your organization.
If you like it, it will be up and running in your environment within 48 hours of you signing up with us. Feel free to contact us for other DevOps related queries at contact@opslyft.com.
We will be ready with more DevOps magic in the coming weeks so do come back when you get the time!