22 Feb Learn how to monitor your Jenkins and the CI CD Pipeline in 4 steps

Or check out this guide to event-driven SRE-inspired DevOps for leveling up your existing CI/CD strategy. Continuous deployment to automate the process of deploying completed, tested code into a production environment. It’s a way for the operations part of a DevOps team to automate the process of deploying new code to customers. Makes it easy to run parallel tests on multiple devices, so you can quickly and easily test your app across a wide range of devices and ensure that it works flawlessly on all of them. This makes it a huge time-saver compared to other CI tools that require you to set up and manage separate build environments for each device type.

As each CI tool is built differently and comes with its own strengths and weaknesses, it’s important to choose the one that best fits your use case. The following section contains the most appropriate use cases for each of the CI tools described above. The built-in secret store continuous integration monitoring is a simple key/value store that is used to manage secrets for GitHub Actions. The store is backed by the GitHub database and all data is encrypted at rest. Since each job can be assigned to a different machine or container, you can also run multiple jobs in parallel.

Monitoring CI/CD Pipelines

Continuous deployment is the process of integrating code with infrastructure, ensuring that all tests are passed and policies are followed, and then delivering code into the desired environment. Of course, each company has its procedure, but the essential processes can be summarised as follows. This concept is powerful because it allows parts or all of a pipeline to be automated, speeding up the process and eliminating errors. In other words, the purpose of a CI/CD pipeline workflow is to make it easier for businesses to automatically deploy software numerous times each day. While investing in automated testing will address the former, the latter requires engagement with stakeholders to understand how their needs can be met more efficiently. Alternatively, if the automated steps are slow or unreliable, then build duration metrics can be used to identify the stages taking the most time.

While both concepts play a crucial role in ensuring the safety and security of your systems, data, and applications, monitoring and observability are complementary capabilities and are not the same. Infrastructure Monitoring collects the data from the IT infrastructure and analyzes it to derive deep insights that help in tracking the performance and availability of the computer systems, networks, and other IT systems. It also helps in gleaning real-time information on metrics such as CPU utilization, server availability, system memory, disk space, and network traffic. Infrastructure Monitoring covers hardware monitoring, OS monitoring, network monitoring, and application monitoring.

Why Does CI/CD Cause Application Issues?

As if continuous deployment wasn’t complicated enough, companies are now starting to use Kubernetes at the core of their deployment pipeline. Kubernetes is a great tool that adds significant capabilities when it comes to deployment but as was recently discussed, Kubernetes is COMPLEX. Using a complex orchestration tool in the CI/CD pipeline adds another layer to the stack that must be monitored. If you are executing your tests in a test environment, you should also log the environment itself. This is similar to logging your deployment environment and follows many of the same steps. To differentiate your test environment logs from your production environment logs, consider using tags or separate Mezmo organizations.

Alternatively, you can also configure alerts in a Prometheus rules file and deliver them using Alertmanager. Today we will learn how to monitor Kubernetes based CI/CD pipelines using Prometheus. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery form the backbone of the product delivery lifecycle.

Continuous deployment

Every version of code written by a developer is kept for an infinite period. Monitoring the proportion of failures out of the total number of deployments helps measure your performance against SLAs. A low resolution time shows you’re using your pipeline to best effect; by dealing with issues as soon as they are found, you can work more efficiently , and you avoid building more functionality on top of unstable code. Time to fix tests is the time between a build reporting a failed test and the same test passing on a subsequent build. This metric gives you an indication of how quickly you’re able to respond to issues identified in the pipeline. Mean time to recovery or resolution measures the time it takes to address a production failure.

These requests trigger a build on the commit that was made and scan the contents of the commit for any changes. This eliminates the manual process of scanning code and allows you to debug the results of your builds before they are actually completed. Due to its popularity, most tools used in modern CI/CD pipelines have developed plugins for Jenkins CI integration.

Tools

These principles form the general idea of how a DevOps development lifecycle may look. If you’re not familiar with the peculiarities of DevOps and the practices used in it, we recommend you read this section first. An Azure DevOps account Azure Pipelines is a service offered within Azure DevOps, so you will need an Azure DevOps account to use Azure Pipelines. Tekton seamlessly integrates with a variety of popular CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, Skaffold, and Knative, among others, making it a flexible choice for organizations with varying requirements.

• This can help you identify any issues with your deployment process and improve the speed and reliability of your deployments.
• The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of New Relic.
• You can find some guides that will go more in depth to help you getting started with these practices.
• The use of eBPF is another substantial upside, Mercer added, calling it a clever way to identify problems in a software build without the use of a more resource-intensive agent.
• This means that on top of automated testing, you have an automated release process and you can deploy your application any time by clicking a button.
• DevOps is a culture, a set of processes, and a continuous improvement model that enables organizations to quickly and efficiently respond to changes in business requirements.

This ensures that code changes are continuously tested and integrated with the existing codebase, which helps identify and resolve any issues early on. On the other hand, Continuous Delivery/Deployment refers to the practice of automatically building, testing, and deploying code changes to production as soon as they are approved. This reduces the time and effort required to release new features and bug fixes and allows for faster feedback from users. As automation is one of the key ingredients of an efficient CI/CD pipeline, it makes perfect sense to automate monitoring and observability too. The idea of continuous monitoring and observability is a logical corollary of the CI/CD philosophy.

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These integrations will also collect logs from the tool itself, allowing you to monitor changes to your environment from the Mezmo web app. You can learn more about monitoring SaltStack logs in Mezmo by reading our blog post. You can integrate these APIs in deployment pipelines to verify the behavior of newly deployed instances, and either automatically continue the deployments or roll back according to the health status. Integrating automated service health checks in deployment pipelines is critical for end-to-end deployment automation, which crucially enables deployment frequency to be increased. To see the effects of continuous integration and delivery for DevOps in practice, watch how Dynatrace enabled the creation of an automated, integrated application delivery pipeline for a major telecom firm.

Logging collects and stores detailed records of events, messages, and traces that occur during the execution of your code. Both monitoring and logging help you identify and troubleshoot issues, optimize performance, and improve user experience. GitLab is a user-friendly code management platform that includes tools for CI/CD, code views, and troubleshooting, and comes with pre-installed packages for Linux distributions. It is a great option if you’re looking for one platform that allows you to plan, build, test, deploy and monitor applications. GitLab CI/CD is a continuous integration and delivery tool that’s available in open source or enterprise editions.