It is hard to differentiate between DevOps and IT Monitoring and to draw a definitive line where their scope stops. These two skills work well together in an Agile and Lean environment to build efficient ITOps that allows for continuous integration and continuous delivery in a secure and easily manageable IT infrastructure.

DevOps and IT Monitoring meet at the crossroads of automation and IT infrastructure management, however they both cover different aspects of IT infrastructure:

Scope

DevOps mainly covers application and virtual servers, while IT monitoring services are applicable to any system component. In the case of a common IaaS, IT monitoring ensures continuity for the entire platform.

Processes

DevOps introduces a new dimension to IT infrastructure – Infrastructure as Code (IaC). This involves writing code that complies with software development practices to automate configuration management, server provisioning, and software deployment. Through IaC, DevOps bridges the gap between the Dev and ITOps teams, allowing both Developers and IT Operations Engineers to work together in order to construct an IT infrastructure. DevOps practices also increase productivity and reduce the time spent on repetitive actions by using automation to take care of similar processes.

IT monitoring is a more proactive approach to IT infrastructure management. It focuses on prevention to ensure around-the-clock system availability.

Tech skills

When performing IT monitoring, DevOps is optional, especially during the diagnosis stage. DevOps practices come more into play when corrective actions need to be implemented. These corrective actions often come in the form of automated scripts and are related to troubleshooting virtual or application servers. IT monitoring can be performed either by dedicated IT Operations Engineers (technical monitoring) or by non-IT personnel (functional monitoring).

Tools

There are many tools available that can be used to compliment an IT infrastructure:

• Configuration Management and Continuous Deployment: Ansible, Terraform, Puppet, Chef, CodeDeploy, Capistrano, Jenkins, GitlabCI
• Continuous Monitoring: Newrelic, Nagios, PRTG, Graphana
• Ticketing and Knowledge Base: Jira, GLPI, Wiki, Confluence
• Technologies: Linux, Windows, VMWare, Amazon Web Services, Apache, Nginx, Tomcat, HAProxy, Supervisor, UWSGI, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MongoDB, Kafka, Spark, Hadoop, RabbitMQ, Docker
• Scripting languages: Python, Shell Scripting, YAML, Ruby

DevOps leverages the power of Configuration Management and Continuous Deployment tools while IT monitoring strategies focus on ticketing and knowledge base management as well as Continuous Monitoring solutions. Technologies and scripting languages are common for both DevOps and IT monitoring.

DevOps and IT monitoring practices work well with IT Outsourcing solutions. At Pentalog, we implement DevOps practices and IT monitoring strategies in all of our IT outsourcing projects. Our DevOps and IT Operations Engineers work together to provide IaaS and PaaS solutions for our clients worldwide.

We have also equipped our latest projects with cloud-based infrastructures managed through powerful DevOps practices and efficient IT monitoring services in an Agile environment. This has enabled us to automate several processes and significantly reduce the time spent on setting up environments, backing up data and updating infrastructure components to the latest versions available.