A DevOps Halloween Lesson: Don’t Let Operational Issues Rot Your Business

DevOps may not yet be perceived as a glamorous role (trust me, that time will come), but it performs a critical function in a cloud-based business: Keeping release cycles on track and revenue flowing.

DevOps must deal with zombies popping up on all sides, in the form of 500’s, 404’s, service timeouts, and fatal exceptions. Failing to attack these issues as soon as they crop up can generate rot throughout your business because customers have very little tolerance for a bad experience online. I’m a big believer in DevOps as the new face of customer experience (more on this to follow).

Statistics tell us that no amount of testing will uncover every zombie lurking in your systems, especially the low-probability ones. People try to do things that even the best use cases don’t anticipate, or best QA teams every test for.

Therefore, operating at scale also means finding and fixing problems on the fly. At the core it’s simple: Humans write code, humans make mistakes, applications inherit them, and scale exposes them.

Luckily, you have a powerful zombie-killing weapon at your disposal: log management. It doesn’t matter what you do where you host your applications or how you code them; Loggly will always be here for you, in the clouds and out of the line of fire from your network.

By proactively monitoring for errors and performance degradation and allowing Loggly to notify you through alerts, you’ll never have to sleep in fear again. Calvin-French Owen, co-founder of Loggly customer Segment, whose business revolves around integrations with third-party services, summarizes it well: “Loggly is a way to keep our sanity around having all of these external touchpoints.”

So as you load up your bag with treats on Halloween, be sure to load up on your #DevOpsZombieKillers before the next APP-pocalypse strikes. Here’s how:

1. Aggregate all of your log data with a convenient, cloud-based log management solution. (If you don’t have an account with Loggly, it takes less than a minute to start a free trial.)
2. Set up dashboards and alerts to monitor your logs for errors and performance problems, so that you can detect the zombie incursion within minutes.
3. Have processes in place to troubleshoot operational issues and bugs in your code.

Take control of your fate: With these steps in place, you’ll rest easier. Without them, your site and apps might soon rest in peace. More than 5,000 customers have realized the value of Loggly, and you deserve to be our next.

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