Hi Readers!
In today’s article, we pick about Continuous Monitoring as a part of our DevOps Series. Owing to the rapid increase in the number of applications across various environments organizations are struggling to optimize and secure cloud-based infrastructures and environments. Continuous monitoring is the technology required to introduce monitoring across each phase of your DevOps and IT operations lifecycles. Continuous Monitoring (CM) as a practice uses analytics and feedback to identify security and compliance-related issues in an IT infrastructure where CM provides assistance in sensitive security processes such as to cause analysis or incident response.
Why do we need Continuous Monitoring?
CM helps in ensuring that the performance, robustness, and reliability of our application and infrastructure starting from development to production. Continuous monitoring is an aggregation of the principles of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD). This helps in developing and delivering the project at a rapid pace that too more reliably with an aim to provide continuous value to users. This practice most importantly increases the visibility of network activities especially suspicious activities that lead to a security breach and reduce the risk of cyberattacks with an alert that triggers the rapid response.
Fundamentally the benefits of CM revolve around the following pointers.
- To achieve Transparency and Visibility
- To Reduce Risks
- To have a Closer Monitoring Of Operational Issues
- Enables Real-Time Feedback
- To keep a Track Of User Experience Post Application updates
How is Continuous Monitoring Beneficial?
- With real-time monitoring in continuous monitoring, SecOps teams get clearer visibility of the internal processes of the infrastructure. The analysis of the data across the network makes it easier to monitor all critical events.
- We also get to act faster on incidents, report them to the response team which leads to increased safety owing to quick response in cases of threats or operations issues.
- As a benefit of CM, teams respond faster to performance-related issues which reduces the system downtime.
- CM also helps in providing transparent monitoring of user behavior so that businesses can estimate and understand the user experience to be able to provide the best suitable offerings to the customer.
Type of Monitoring
- System Performance Monitoring — Monitoring characteristics affecting the performance of systems like CPU Utilisation, free memory, N/W utilization, etc.
- Hardware Health Monitoring — Checking CPU temperature, Hard Disk health.
- Service Monitoring — This ensures that all services are up and responding as expected. These services can range from the mail, FTP, DB, etc.
- System Security Control and Audit — This is very crucial from a security point of view where we constantly observe malware, virus attacks along with firewall breach issues.
- Third-party Integration Monitoring — Most of the applications consume or are dependent on 3rd party APIs or systems. These services can block or stall the application. Observing these 3rd party integration is a critical part of continuous monitoring.
Due to the lack of continuous monitoring, organizations are not able to identify, resolve, or understand key insights regarding certain risks.
Tools for Continuous Monitoring:
- Git
- Sensu
- Nagios
We believe by now you must have understood that adopting practices such as CM makes such a big difference. They help processes to identify and report discrepancies in security. In the DevOps world, practices like Continuous Monitoring, CI/CD are really inevitable as they are critical in maintaining transparency in a project.
See you soon!
Originally published at https://www.qekafe.com on August 10, 2020.
