According to DevOps Global Market Report 2022 by Research and Markets, the DevOps market is projected to hit a staggering $20.53 billion by 2026, with a CAGR of 23.08% that's set to blow the competition out of the water.
DevOps has become an essential practice in modern software development, but with its growing importance comes a growing set of challenges. DevOps is not just about combining development and operations teams, but it is a cultural shift in the way software development and delivery are managed.
In this article, we will explore some of the most significant DevOps challenges facing organizations today and why Apica has the ideal solution to tackle them.
1. The complexity of distributed systems
Modern software systems are increasingly built using microservices architecture, which involves numerous interconnected components. This makes it difficult to monitor and trace the behavior of individual components and their interactions.
As the complexity of software applications continues to grow, monitoring and observability have become critical components of DevOps. Monitoring involves collecting data from various sources to detect and diagnose problems in real-time, while observability involves understanding the behavior of the system as a whole.
Implementing effective monitoring and observability can be challenging, as it requires DevOps teams to work closely with development and operations teams to collect and analyze data from various sources.
2. High cardinality of data
The sheer volume of data generated by modern systems can be overwhelming. This high cardinality poses challenges in collecting, analyzing, and acting upon metrics, logs, and traces, making it difficult for DevOps professionals to detect anomalies and determine the root causes of issues.
One example of high cardinality data is in log files. Log files are typically used to track system events and can contain a huge number of unique values. For example, consider a web server that generates log files with a record of each HTTP request. Each request typically includes a number of parameters, such as the user agent, the IP address of the requesting device, the requested URL, and any cookies associated with the request. With millions of unique users accessing a website each day, the log file for a single day can contain billions of unique values.
3. Siloed monitoring tools
Often, organizations use different monitoring tools for different purposes, such as logs, metrics, and traces. This can lead to fragmented visibility, requiring DevOps teams to switch between multiple tools to understand the overall health of the system, which is time-consuming and inefficient.
Another challenge with siloed monitoring tools is the time and cost involved in maintaining multiple tools. Each tool may have its own set of requirements and configurations, which can increase the complexity of the monitoring process. This can lead to longer resolution times, higher costs, and a greater risk of errors.
4. Alert fatigue
As systems become more complex, the number of alerts generated by monitoring tools tends to increase. This can lead to alert fatigue, where DevOps professionals become desensitized to alerts or struggle to prioritize them, potentially resulting in delayed incident resolution.
This is a significant problem because when a critical alert is triggered, and the team fails to respond promptly, it can lead to downtime, data loss, or other serious issues.
Alert fatigue is often caused by a few different factors. One is the use of too many monitoring tools or systems, each generating its own set of alerts. This can create a situation where the team receives a flood of alerts that are not always relevant or actionable.
In addition, poorly configured or tuned alerts can also contribute to alert fatigue. If alerts are not properly prioritized, or if they trigger too frequently, they can quickly become noise, making it difficult for team members to distinguish important alerts from those that are less critical.
5. Real-time analysis and response
To maintain high levels of performance and reliability, DevOps professionals need to analyze system behavior and respond to issues in real-time. However, achieving real-time analysis and response is challenging for DevOps for the following reasons:
- Data volume: With the increasing amount of data generated by applications, systems, and infrastructure, it can be difficult to process and analyze data in real-time.
- Data complexity: Data generated by applications, systems, and infrastructure is often diverse and complex, making it challenging to extract insights and respond to issues in real-time.
- Integration of multiple tools and systems: Achieving real-time analysis and response requires the integration of multiple tools and systems, which can be a complex and time-consuming process.
- Response time: DevOps teams need to ensure that they have the right processes and workflows in place to enable fast response times.
- Scalability: Real-time analysis and response require scalable infrastructure and tools that can handle the increasing amount of data generated by applications, systems, and infrastructure. Therefore, DevOps teams need to ensure that their infrastructure and tools can scale up or down as needed to meet changing demands.
How Apica Solves the DevOps Challenges
To address these challenges, DevOps professionals should focus on adopting comprehensive, integrated observability platforms that can handle the complexity of modern distributed systems and provide actionable insights. Additionally, teams should prioritize automating tasks, reducing alert noise, and continually refining monitoring and alerting strategies to improve overall system health and performance.
To address the top 5 DevOps challenges related to observability, a comprehensive observability platform should offer the following features:
Handling Complexity of distributed systems
- Service mesh integration: The platform should integrate seamlessly with service meshes like Istio, Linkerd, or Consul, providing better visibility into microservices interactions. With Apica’s limitless scale, the platform can easily handle the intricate monitoring and tracing requirements of distributed systems, offering a comprehensive view of microservices and their interactions.
- Distributed tracing: The platform should support distributed tracing tools like OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, or Zipkin, allowing teams to trace requests across services and better understand the system’s behavior. Apica’’s distributed tracing capabilities with OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, etc. simplify the process of tracking requests across services, providing better visibility into the overall system behavior and promoting efficient problem-solving.
- Topology visualization: The platform should provide visualizations of service dependencies, which helps teams understand the architecture and interactions of various components in a distributed system. The Apica platform offers visual representations of service interconnections, enabling teams to grasp the architecture and interplay of different elements within a distributed system.
Support for High cardinality of data
- Metric aggregation: The platform should support the aggregation of metrics, such as percentiles, histograms, or summaries, to provide insights while reducing data granularity. apica.io’s complete data pipeline control allows for efficient metric aggregation, data filtering, and prioritization, ensuring that only the most relevant data points are collected and processed.
- Data filtering and prioritization: The platform should offer intelligent filtering options to collect and process only the most relevant data points.
- Scalability: The platform should be designed to handle high-cardinality data efficiently, offering horizontal scalability to distribute load across multiple nodes and support fast indexing and querying. Apica’s limitless scale ensures seamless horizontal scalability, enabling teams to manage high-cardinality data efficiently without compromising on performance or storage.
Limits Siloed monitoring tools
- Unified monitoring: The platform should provide a single pane of glass for monitoring metrics, logs, and traces, eliminating the need to switch between multiple tools. Apica offers a unified observability platform that integrates metrics, logs and traces providing a holistic view of the system’s health.
- Integration with existing tools: The platform should support integration with popular monitoring tools and services, enabling teams to leverage their existing investments in monitoring infrastructure.
- Customizable dashboards: With Apica, you get personalized dashboards that enable teams to visualize and analyze data from multiple sources in a unified view.
Control/Handle Alert fatigue
- Real-time data processing: The platform should support real-time processing of data, enabling teams to quickly identify and respond to issues as they arise.
- Stream processing: The platform should offer stream processing capabilities to analyze data in motion and trigger alerts or automated responses based on predefined conditions.
- Incident management integration: The platform should integrate with popular incident management tools like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or VictorOps, enabling faster response and resolution of incidents.
Bottomline
The adoption of DevOps practices has revolutionized the way software development and delivery are carried out. That being said, DevOps is not void of the inevitable challenges that come with any domain.
By leveraging apica.io’s patented platform, DevOps teams can overcome the challenges associated with observability in modern distributed systems, high cardinality of data, siloed monitoring tools, alert fatigue, and real-time analysis and response. The platform’s limitless scale, complete data pipeline control, and data autonomy features provide a powerful and flexible solution for managing complex environments.
In a Glimpse
- The DevOps market is projected to hit $20.53 billion by 2026.
With the growing importance of DevOps, comes a growing set of challenges. - Explore the top 5 DevOps challenges related to observability, and how Apica solves them.
- The challenges are the complexity of distributed systems, high cardinality of data, siloed monitoring tools, alert fatigue, and real-time analysis and response.
- Apica offers a comprehensive observability platform that integrates seamlessly with service meshes and reduces alert noise through automation.
- Apica continually refines monitoring and alerting strategies to improve overall system health and performance.
