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5 minutes read
Written by Ismail Egilmez
Business Development Manager @Thundra 
Continuous integration (CI) is a DevOps practice whereby code contributed by engineers is integrated into a project frequently and automatically. CI involves the use of a shared version control system (VCS), which is usually accompanied by other tools (including testing tools,) to manage source code. Engineers push code changes using the shared VCS; the code is then reviewed and tested before the build process is completed. This entire process is automated to maximize speed and performance.
Observability refers to the practice of measuring a system’s internal state based on its corresponding output. It allows you to gain insights into a system’s state by examining logs, data and other key metrics.
CI observability, therefore, provides visibility into your CI pipeline’s workflow. As more code is integrated, observability becomes an important process so you can understand how your infrastructure is performing and ensure that quality code is being shipped.
A typical application’s software is a complex beast with lots of interconnected components. As a result, issues or failures can occur in different components and at various workflow stages. CI observability gives you knowledge about your software infrastructure and workflow so when a problem inevitably arises, you can identify and fix it as quickly as possible.
CI observability allows you to:
Now that we understand why CI observability is so crucial, let’s explore what exactly observability is in more depth. Observability consists of three major processes: logging, metrics, and tracing. Taken together, they give a holistic picture of your software’s health.
Logging is the process of recording data about events with corresponding timestamps as well as indexes with which they can be retrieved. For example, if a payment transaction fails in a payment system, such an event can be logged with the timestamp at which point the event occurred as well as other necessary details that may give you insights into the incident. Logs are not only useful for logging errors; recording logs is a general good practice because logs produce data for quantitative and analytical purposes.
Let’s review some benefits of logging:
Metrics are quantifiable numeric values that can be used to measure your application’s behavior, health and performance. They can be collected, correlated, aggregated and analyzed in order to understand the state of your system as a whole.
While logs keep records of events, metrics go one step deeper by producing data from your system; while logs record events, metrics can indicate which events are actually important. As such, metrics can be obtained from logs.
Some benefits of metrics include:
Tracing involves tracking an operation or request’s flow from its initialization to its completion. The information obtained is intended to be used to optimize your application’s performance. Tracing helps engineers to figure out which stages in the workflow contain bottlenecks, providing information including how and where the error occurred, which feature/function triggered the error and which change made the error.
Tracing offers benefits such as:
When it comes to CI observability, specific difficulties are likely to arise. You may encounter challenges that pertain particularly to your application’s complexity and size, which produce difficulties common to CI pipeline observability efforts.
As more code is integrated, your application will grow increasingly complex. Gaining full insight into, and understanding of, your application might become difficult and overwhelming as you need to manage a growing, multipart application. As your application scales, so does the challenge of observability.
While being able to monitor your application in real time is helpful, finding or creating an appropriate tool can take time if you opt to build and/or implement this tool in house, or require significant financial outlay if you opt to outsource. However, without real-time monitoring, you won’t be able to detect errors in the early stages of your CI workflow, and this can create knock-on costs, both in time and money, for your team.
Depending on the size of your project and team structure, the source code for your application could become overwhelming for any single person to understand. Gaining proper visibility into your CI workflow is critical when it comes to monitoring stages of your workflow. Observability helps you to identify relevant metrics and act upon them quickly and allows a team of any size and complexity to stay on the same page. As such, CI observability is essential for efficient, effective processes and for an optimized user experience.
Observability tools have functionalities and features that allow you to perform actions, including monitoring, tracing, and logging. As such, they make it easier to gain essential knowledge about your application’s health and performance, thereby gaining insights into any fixes or improvements required in your system.
Let’s review some key qualities that you should be looking for in your observability tool:
Having a powerful observability tool that offers all of the above features is essential to optimizing your CI pipeline. However, many tools on the market today, whether APMs or error-tracking tools,—fail in ways that can make full CI pipeline visibility a challenge:
It’s essential to select an observability tool that can handle complex architectures, high volumes of data, and large, multifaceted teams. Even if your application doesn’t have these needs today, you need a tool that can grow with you as you scale your application.
Foresight is a comprehensive observability tool that provides you with complete visibility into the state of your CI/CD pipelines. Foresight helps you assess the risk of new changes, reduce build times, and ship quality software via powerful features.
Create your free Foresight account and start monitoring your GitHub CI pipelines and tests. You can reach out to the Foresight team via its Discord community.
Why CI Observability Matters
Pillars of Observability
CI Observability Challenges
Observability Tools
Common Problems with Monitoring Tools
Introduction to Foresight
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Get our new blogs delivered straight to your inbox.
We’ll make sure to share the best materials crafted for you!
5 minutes read
Written by Ismail Egilmez
Business Development Manager @Thundra
Continuous integration (CI) is a DevOps practice whereby code contributed by engineers is integrated into a project frequently and automatically. CI involves the use of a shared version control system (VCS), which is usually accompanied by other tools (including testing tools,) to manage source code. Engineers push code changes using the shared VCS; the code is then reviewed and tested before the build process is completed. This entire process is automated to maximize speed and performance.
Observability refers to the practice of measuring a system’s internal state based on its corresponding output. It allows you to gain insights into a system’s state by examining logs, data and other key metrics.
CI observability, therefore, provides visibility into your CI pipeline’s workflow. As more code is integrated, observability becomes an important process so you can understand how your infrastructure is performing and ensure that quality code is being shipped.
A typical application’s software is a complex beast with lots of interconnected components. As a result, issues or failures can occur in different components and at various workflow stages. CI observability gives you knowledge about your software infrastructure and workflow so when a problem inevitably arises, you can identify and fix it as quickly as possible.
CI observability allows you to:
Now that we understand why CI observability is so crucial, let’s explore what exactly observability is in more depth. Observability consists of three major processes: logging, metrics, and tracing. Taken together, they give a holistic picture of your software’s health.
Logging is the process of recording data about events with corresponding timestamps as well as indexes with which they can be retrieved. For example, if a payment transaction fails in a payment system, such an event can be logged with the timestamp at which point the event occurred as well as other necessary details that may give you insights into the incident. Logs are not only useful for logging errors; recording logs is a general good practice because logs produce data for quantitative and analytical purposes.
Let’s review some benefits of logging:
Metrics are quantifiable numeric values that can be used to measure your application’s behavior, health and performance. They can be collected, correlated, aggregated and analyzed in order to understand the state of your system as a whole.
While logs keep records of events, metrics go one step deeper by producing data from your system; while logs record events, metrics can indicate which events are actually important. As such, metrics can be obtained from logs.
Some benefits of metrics include:
Tracing involves tracking an operation or request’s flow from its initialization to its completion. The information obtained is intended to be used to optimize your application’s performance. Tracing helps engineers to figure out which stages in the workflow contain bottlenecks, providing information including how and where the error occurred, which feature/function triggered the error and which change made the error.
Tracing offers benefits such as:
When it comes to CI observability, specific difficulties are likely to arise. You may encounter challenges that pertain particularly to your application’s complexity and size, which produce difficulties common to CI pipeline observability efforts.
As more code is integrated, your application will grow increasingly complex. Gaining full insight into, and understanding of, your application might become difficult and overwhelming as you need to manage a growing, multipart application. As your application scales, so does the challenge of observability.
While being able to monitor your application in real time is helpful, finding or creating an appropriate tool can take time if you opt to build and/or implement this tool in house, or require significant financial outlay if you opt to outsource. However, without real-time monitoring, you won’t be able to detect errors in the early stages of your CI workflow, and this can create knock-on costs, both in time and money, for your team.
Depending on the size of your project and team structure, the source code for your application could become overwhelming for any single person to understand. Gaining proper visibility into your CI workflow is critical when it comes to monitoring stages of your workflow. Observability helps you to identify relevant metrics and act upon them quickly and allows a team of any size and complexity to stay on the same page. As such, CI observability is essential for efficient, effective processes and for an optimized user experience.
Observability tools have functionalities and features that allow you to perform actions, including monitoring, tracing, and logging. As such, they make it easier to gain essential knowledge about your application’s health and performance, thereby gaining insights into any fixes or improvements required in your system.
Let’s review some key qualities that you should be looking for in your observability tool:
Having a powerful observability tool that offers all of the above features is essential to optimizing your CI pipeline. However, many tools on the market today, whether APMs or error-tracking tools,—fail in ways that can make full CI pipeline visibility a challenge:
It’s essential to select an observability tool that can handle complex architectures, high volumes of data, and large, multifaceted teams. Even if your application doesn’t have these needs today, you need a tool that can grow with you as you scale your application.
Foresight is a comprehensive observability tool that provides you with complete visibility into the state of your CI/CD pipelines. Foresight helps you assess the risk of new changes, reduce build times, and ship quality software via powerful features.
Create your free Foresight account and start monitoring your GitHub CI pipelines and tests. You can reach out to the Foresight team via its Discord community.
Why CI Observability Matters
Pillars of Observability
CI Observability Challenges
Observability Tools
Common Problems with Monitoring Tools
Introduction to Foresight
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR BLOG
Get our new blogs delivered straight to your inbox.
Continuous integration (CI) is a DevOps practice whereby code contributed by engineers is integrated into a project frequently and automatically. CI involves the use of a shared version control system (VCS), which is usually accompanied by other tools (including testing tools,) to manage source code. Engineers push code changes using the shared VCS; the code is then reviewed and tested before the build process is completed. This entire process is automated to maximize speed and performance.
Observability refers to the practice of measuring a system’s internal state based on its corresponding output. It allows you to gain insights into a system’s state by examining logs, data and other key metrics.
CI observability, therefore, provides visibility into your CI pipeline’s workflow. As more code is integrated, observability becomes an important process so you can understand how your infrastructure is performing and ensure that quality code is being shipped.
A typical application’s software is a complex beast with lots of interconnected components. As a result, issues or failures can occur in different components and at various workflow stages. CI observability gives you knowledge about your software infrastructure and workflow so when a problem inevitably arises, you can identify and fix it as quickly as possible.
CI observability allows you to:
Now that we understand why CI observability is so crucial, let’s explore what exactly observability is in more depth. Observability consists of three major processes: logging, metrics, and tracing. Taken together, they give a holistic picture of your software’s health.
Logging is the process of recording data about events with corresponding timestamps as well as indexes with which they can be retrieved. For example, if a payment transaction fails in a payment system, such an event can be logged with the timestamp at which point the event occurred as well as other necessary details that may give you insights into the incident. Logs are not only useful for logging errors; recording logs is a general good practice because logs produce data for quantitative and analytical purposes.
Let’s review some benefits of logging:
Metrics are quantifiable numeric values that can be used to measure your application’s behavior, health and performance. They can be collected, correlated, aggregated and analyzed in order to understand the state of your system as a whole.
While logs keep records of events, metrics go one step deeper by producing data from your system; while logs record events, metrics can indicate which events are actually important. As such, metrics can be obtained from logs.
Some benefits of metrics include:
Tracing involves tracking an operation or request’s flow from its initialization to its completion. The information obtained is intended to be used to optimize your application’s performance. Tracing helps engineers to figure out which stages in the workflow contain bottlenecks, providing information including how and where the error occurred, which feature/function triggered the error and which change made the error.
Tracing offers benefits such as:
When it comes to CI observability, specific difficulties are likely to arise. You may encounter challenges that pertain particularly to your application’s complexity and size, which produce difficulties common to CI pipeline observability efforts.
As more code is integrated, your application will grow increasingly complex. Gaining full insight into, and understanding of, your application might become difficult and overwhelming as you need to manage a growing, multipart application. As your application scales, so does the challenge of observability.
While being able to monitor your application in real time is helpful, finding or creating an appropriate tool can take time if you opt to build and/or implement this tool in house, or require significant financial outlay if you opt to outsource. However, without real-time monitoring, you won’t be able to detect errors in the early stages of your CI workflow, and this can create knock-on costs, both in time and money, for your team.
Depending on the size of your project and team structure, the source code for your application could become overwhelming for any single person to understand. Gaining proper visibility into your CI workflow is critical when it comes to monitoring stages of your workflow. Observability helps you to identify relevant metrics and act upon them quickly and allows a team of any size and complexity to stay on the same page. As such, CI observability is essential for efficient, effective processes and for an optimized user experience.
Observability tools have functionalities and features that allow you to perform actions, including monitoring, tracing, and logging. As such, they make it easier to gain essential knowledge about your application’s health and performance, thereby gaining insights into any fixes or improvements required in your system.
Let’s review some key qualities that you should be looking for in your observability tool:
Having a powerful observability tool that offers all of the above features is essential to optimizing your CI pipeline. However, many tools on the market today, whether APMs or error-tracking tools,—fail in ways that can make full CI pipeline visibility a challenge:
It’s essential to select an observability tool that can handle complex architectures, high volumes of data, and large, multifaceted teams. Even if your application doesn’t have these needs today, you need a tool that can grow with you as you scale your application.
Foresight is a comprehensive observability tool that provides you with complete visibility into the state of your CI/CD pipelines. Foresight helps you assess the risk of new changes, reduce build times, and ship quality software via powerful features.
Create your free Foresight account and start monitoring your GitHub CI pipelines and tests. You can reach out to the Foresight team via its Discord community.
Observability refers to the practice of measuring a system’s internal state based on its corresponding output. It allows you to gain insights into a system’s state by examining logs, data and other key metrics.
CI observability, therefore, provides visibility into your CI pipeline’s workflow. As more code is integrated, observability becomes an important process so you can understand how your infrastructure is performing and ensure that quality code is being shipped.
A typical application’s software is a complex beast with lots of interconnected components. As a result, issues or failures can occur in different components and at various workflow stages. CI observability gives you knowledge about your software infrastructure and workflow so when a problem inevitably arises, you can identify and fix it as quickly as possible.
CI observability allows you to:
Now that we understand why CI observability is so crucial, let’s explore what exactly observability is in more depth. Observability consists of three major processes: logging, metrics, and tracing. Taken together, they give a holistic picture of your software’s health.
Logging is the process of recording data about events with corresponding timestamps as well as indexes with which they can be retrieved. For example, if a payment transaction fails in a payment system, such an event can be logged with the timestamp at which point the event occurred as well as other necessary details that may give you insights into the incident. Logs are not only useful for logging errors; recording logs is a general good practice because logs produce data for quantitative and analytical purposes.
Let’s review some benefits of logging:
Metrics are quantifiable numeric values that can be used to measure your application’s behavior, health and performance. They can be collected, correlated, aggregated and analyzed in order to understand the state of your system as a whole.
While logs keep records of events, metrics go one step deeper by producing data from your system; while logs record events, metrics can indicate which events are actually important. As such, metrics can be obtained from logs.
Some benefits of metrics include:
Tracing involves tracking an operation or request’s flow from its initialization to its completion. The information obtained is intended to be used to optimize your application’s performance. Tracing helps engineers to figure out which stages in the workflow contain bottlenecks, providing information including how and where the error occurred, which feature/function triggered the error and which change made the error.
Tracing offers benefits such as:
When it comes to CI observability, specific difficulties are likely to arise. You may encounter challenges that pertain particularly to your application’s complexity and size, which produce difficulties common to CI pipeline observability efforts.
As more code is integrated, your application will grow increasingly complex. Gaining full insight into, and understanding of, your application might become difficult and overwhelming as you need to manage a growing, multipart application. As your application scales, so does the challenge of observability.
While being able to monitor your application in real time is helpful, finding or creating an appropriate tool can take time if you opt to build and/or implement this tool in house, or require significant financial outlay if you opt to outsource. However, without real-time monitoring, you won’t be able to detect errors in the early stages of your CI workflow, and this can create knock-on costs, both in time and money, for your team.
Depending on the size of your project and team structure, the source code for your application could become overwhelming for any single person to understand. Gaining proper visibility into your CI workflow is critical when it comes to monitoring stages of your workflow. Observability helps you to identify relevant metrics and act upon them quickly and allows a team of any size and complexity to stay on the same page. As such, CI observability is essential for efficient, effective processes and for an optimized user experience.
Observability tools have functionalities and features that allow you to perform actions, including monitoring, tracing, and logging. As such, they make it easier to gain essential knowledge about your application’s health and performance, thereby gaining insights into any fixes or improvements required in your system.
Let’s review some key qualities that you should be looking for in your observability tool:
Having a powerful observability tool that offers all of the above features is essential to optimizing your CI pipeline. However, many tools on the market today, whether APMs or error-tracking tools,—fail in ways that can make full CI pipeline visibility a challenge:
It’s essential to select an observability tool that can handle complex architectures, high volumes of data, and large, multifaceted teams. Even if your application doesn’t have these needs today, you need a tool that can grow with you as you scale your application.
Foresight is a comprehensive observability tool that provides you with complete visibility into the state of your CI/CD pipelines. Foresight helps you assess the risk of new changes, reduce build times, and ship quality software via powerful features.
Create your free Foresight account and start monitoring your GitHub CI pipelines and tests. You can reach out to the Foresight team via its Discord community.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Thundra blog authored by Ismail Egilmez. Read the original post at: https://blog.thundra.io/introduction-to-continuous-integration-observability
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