DevOps Automation Tools

DevOps is a combination of technologies, tools, methodologies, philosophies, and practices that emerged in the late 2000s. Its emergence has represented one of the most significant mindset shifts in software development—one oriented towards continuous improvement of software development and the release of the end product. Along with DevOps came a complete ecosystem of automation tools designed to automate the stages of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and close the gaps between development, operation, quality assurance, and the rest of the business.

By automating core aspects of the SDLC, organizations can achieve faster delivery and improved accuracy in alignment with their business goals. This automation process includes standard practices such as continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), infrastructure as code (IaC), configuration management, monitoring, and logging. Automation leads to a reduction of overhead and provides faster time to market.

DevOps tools reduce recovery time, boost collaboration, and foster innovation. DevOps tools ensure a seamless flow across the value chain, covering various functionalities. These include building, testing, deploying, releasing, and addressing incident management needs such as reporting, analyzing insights, and team management.

There are core features that every automation tool for DevOps should offer and that provide the most value to SREs by recognizing their needs. Squadcast is one of the leading platforms in the DevOps space, enabling many organizations to achieve high automation and efficiency.

Summary of the key features of DevOps automation tools

The table below provides a summary of key DevOps automation features and information on the capabilities they provide and why they matter.

Monitoring

The most critical of all DevOps activities is data collection, aggregation, and analysis for all parts of the system, which provides SREs with insights into the system’s performance and health. Such metrics can vary but commonly include traffic, latency, resource utilization, and errors generated.

Monitoring plays a crucial role in the DevOps methodology: It is the backbone that ensures that systems are reliable, available, and performing as they are supposed to. Monitoring provides real-time insights into applications and infrastructure health. It is how teams proactively identify and resolve issues before they escalate into major problems.

For example, by monitoring application performance, a team can detect a sudden spike in response time and quickly pinpoint the root cause. Teams can also collect and analyze data on every aspect of their system’s operations, from server health to application usage patterns. This data-driven approach enables informed decisions and often provides the focus for areas of optimization. For example, by monitoring, engineers can recognize a CPU utilization increase during specific events, which will suggest that they implement scaling to meet capacity demands.

SREs need to see monitoring not just in technical terms but also as a business asset for increasing the quality of service and bridging the gaps between development and operations.

Alerting

To rectify issues before they become problems, it is necessary to set up and leverage thresholds and alerts to detect anomalies within a system and notify specific teams depending on the alert category. Like monitoring, the strategic value of alerting extends beyond mere incident response, providing value to the business through its critical role in resource optimization and cost management.

Alerting is both a mechanism for detecting problems and a tool that enables DevOps teams to maintain high service levels, optimize resources, and foster a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration. With proper alert management, teams can ensure that their systems are reliable and cost-effective, ready to meet the demands of the ever-changing environments in which they operate.

Alerts can be sent to Squadcast in various ways, including through webhooks. Take Prometheus as an example of an alert source. From the Service Overview screen within Squadcast, you can add Prometheus as your alert source and use the webhook URL generated by Squadcast in your Alertmanager webhook receiver YAML configuration in Prometheus:

receivers:
- name: 'squadcast-back-end'
  webhook_configs:
  - url: 'http://api.squadcast.com/v2/incidents/prometheus/your-squadcast-token'

You can now use this receiver in your incident routing rules.

For a deeper look at alert routing, see Squadcast’s video on routing rule creation.

Another way to send alerts to Squadcast is by sending a POST request to the Squadcast API. Take, for example, the following Python script, which will read the generated files of a monitoring service and send them as POST requests by utilizing an API token.

import requests
import os
from uuid import uuid4

# Configuration
SQUADCAST_TOKEN = "YOUR_SQUADCAST_TOKEN"
EVENT_FILE_PATH = "/var/log/mon/mymonservice"  

def post_to_squadcast(event_id=None, status=None):
    # Send a post request to Squadcast API with the event details
    url = "https://api.squadcast.com/v2/incidents/api/{SQUADCAST_TOKEN}"
    headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
    payload = {
        "event_id": event_id,
        "status": status,
        "message": "your_service_name",
        "description": "your_service_description"
    }

    # Adjust payload based on the event status
    if status == "resolved":
        del payload["message"], payload["description"]
    else:
        event_id = str(uuid4())
        with open(EVENT_FILE_PATH, 'w') as file:
            file.write(event_id)
        payload["event_id"] = event_id
        payload["status"] = "trigger"

    response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=payload)
    return response

def handle_event(status):
    # Handle event based on MON_PROGRAM_STATUS.
    if status == "0":
        with open(EVENT_FILE_PATH, 'r') as file:
            event_id = file.read().strip()
        post_to_squadcast(event_id=event_id, status="resolved")
        with open(EVENT_FILE_PATH, 'w') as file:
            file.write("")  # Clear the event file
    elif status in ["1", "2"]:
        post_to_squadcast(status="trigger")
    else:
        print("Invalid MON_PROGRAM_STATUS value.")
        exit(1)

def main():
    if not SQUADCAST_TOKEN:
        print("SQUADCAST_TOKEN is not set.")
        exit(1)
    
    # MON_PROGRAM_STATUS is set as an environment variable
    mon_program_status = os.getenv("MON_PROGRAM_STATUS")
    handle_event(mon_program_status)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

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Collaboration

Eliminating the gap between development and operations is foundational—in fact, it is the source of the term “DevOps.” Team collaboration emphasizes open communication, shared responsibilities, and cross-functional teamwork. Fostering such a culture, with its roots in continuous learning, feedback, and mutual respect, significantly improves team efficiency and the rate of innovation.

Team collaboration is especially needed during incidents. The ability to share vital incident updates between engineers and managers and dispatch data where it needs to go with speed and accuracy can make the difference between meeting SLAs and dealing with contract breaches. In any case, the right automation tools must integrate with external collaboration tools, define custom workflows, and enable stakeholders to observe the status of an incident in real time.

With Squadcast, any user or stakeholder can subscribe to an incident and act as a watcher. Watchers can receive notifications for all the updates on an incident even when they are not part of the engineers’ team tending to the incident. This is part of the Enhanced Collaboration for Response Teams feature that comes with Squadcast and allows you to facilitate seamless incident collaboration and control over incidents.

After an incident is over, as a best practice, a postmortem must take place where involved parties analyze in detail what took place during the event to identify the root cause and determine actionable events to prevent the incident from repeating.

With the incident resolved, click Start Postmortem on the Incident Details page, and select one of the predefined postmortem templates. You can always create your own postmortem template or modify an existing one in the Postmortem section under Settings.

On-call shifts and team rotation management

To build customer trust and ensure the success of your incident strategy, you need the right tools—ones that can help you create and manage on-call teams, schedule shift rotations, and provide a complete overview of what is happening during a shift. These tools should also offer automated notifications to engineers for upcoming shifts and allow managers to make one-time adjustments easily when required. With the right tools, you can provide reliable customer service to your customers and earn their trust in managing their products and services.

Another feature within on-call shift management that must not be neglected is the automatic and hassle-free handling of Daylight Savings Time and the ability to use predefined rotation templates or create your own.

On-call schedules have two main approaches, and their use depends on the geographical locations of your operations and the size of the on-call team in your organization. There are two approaches: the “follow-the-sun” approach and a standard rotation. The latter is preferable when working with a centrally located team divided into groups of engineers covering different shifts to cover 24 hours, while the former is preferred by organizations with multiple teams residing in separate time zones. An example of the “follow-the-sun” method would be SREs managing support shifts during the business hours pertinent to their countries and then performing a “handoff” to an SRE team in another country when that country’s business hours begin.

Escalation policy management

An escalation policy is a set of rules indicating when, how, and to whom alerts will be escalated. The last thing you want to be doing during a critical incident is looking for the right people and the appropriate line of communication with them. Automating how the right people are notified at the right time and ensuring that the correct alerts and messages reach the correct people is vital when facing a critical incident.

Defining and putting in place the escalation policies necessary for a set of different incident types will save you the time otherwise spent manually initiating communication with the collective of people with a need to know. Squadcast offers a streamlined process for managing these policies, from their creation to their granular configuration, including setting triggers and actions.

Runbooks

Runbooks are compilations of routine procedures in a central repository used as references during an incident. They streamline the incident management process, providing the steps to be followed in the form of checklists with tasks that need to be executed during specific incidents or types of incidents.

By using runbooks, everyone involved in handling an incident can be on the same page and follow a clear path, starting from a common point. This ensures that the incident-handling team has a clear plan to follow while minimizing confusion and errors.

Runbooks must be easy to access and, ideally, should exist within the same DevOps automation tools you use for incident handling to avoid delays in finding the right runbook when production systems have downtime and service is limited. When following a runbook to resolve an incident, it is important to have the ability to cross out or mark as checked the steps that you have taken to keep on track and have complete awareness of your previous and future actions.

Incident reporting mechanisms

Regardless of any threshold set for the monitoring and alerting systems that an organization uses to detect and avoid incidents, the people on the ground are often the ones who increase incident awareness. A DevOps automation tool that provides your customers with a way to report incidents to you with the essential details is guaranteed to save the day when a problem goes under the radar of your monitoring system.

Squadcast provides an opportunity to create custom bespoke web forms for each customer. These are excellent mechanisms to ensure that an incident is reported, appropriately communicated, registered, and automatically classified with the information your team needs to handle it.

Analytics

In DevOps, performance analytics is an essential feature used to produce actionable insights from the data generated by operations and processes. These analytics provide a comprehensive view of various metrics, such as incident response times, resolution times, and the frequency of issues, enabling teams to have visibility of their efficiency and effectiveness in managing and resolving system incidents. Trends over time help teams identify areas of improvement, understand the impact of implemented changes, and make data-driven decisions to enhance their operational workflows.

MTTA and MTTR

Mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) and mean time to resolve (MTTR) are the metrics that show how effective and efficient a response is to an incident that affects business and operational continuity and customer satisfaction.

The average time it takes for the organization to spot and confirm an incident—in other words, to acknowledge—is measured by MTTA. This metric is a key indicator of how responsive an incident response team is. A short MTTA indicates a team that starts working on an incident quickly, which translates into a reduction in the impact of an incident. A high MTTA value, in contrast, indicates gaps in monitoring and alerting, which translates to delayed response and prolonged, problematic service delivery.

Mean time to resolve (MTTR), on the other hand, is the metric that measures how long it took for the incident to be resolved from the moment it was acknowledged. MTTR measures the effectiveness of the incident response team and its processes, which include resolution, recovery, and verification.

A lower MTTR value proves that response mechanisms are efficient, reflecting the ability of the incident response team to allocate resources, fix any underlying issues, and mitigate the impact on users and business operations. In contrast, a high MTTR translates to problematic incident management processes, ineffective communication, or both.

SLOs

Service-level objectives (SLOs) are targets that an organization sets to quantify specific levels of service reliability and commit to them. SLOs define an acceptable level of service reliability; their purpose is to direct developers toward either the maintenance or improvement of service reliability.

Your organization should take a thoughtful approach to defining achievable SLOs and use these objectives as the next step to set business and development priorities. The process of setting SLOs involves understanding users’ needs and expectations, reviewing historical service performance, and maintaining a balance between new feature development/releases and maintaining high levels of service reliability.

Error budgets

Error budgets are one of the pillars of site reliability engineering. They provide a tangible measurement of the maximum allowable threshold of service failure.

Error budget calculation is directly related to the SLOs discussed above. Take, for example, a service with an SLO of 99%, meaning that it has an error budget of 1%. That 1% is the maximum amount of time that the service is “allowed” to be unavailable within a specific timeframe (usually annually).

Practical error budgets offer a clear, numerical indication of how much risk developers and engineers can afford at any given time.

Furthermore, performance analytics foster a culture of transparency and accountability within DevOps teams. By tracking individual and team contributions to incident management and resolution, these tools highlight performance variances and pinpoint areas where additional training or resources may be required.

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Conclusion

DevOps has revolutionized the software development industry by promoting a mindset of continuous improvement and alignment with business goals. Automation tools have played a critical role in enabling organizations to achieve faster delivery and improved accuracy while reducing overhead, transforming the industry.

The core features of DevOps automation tools, including monitoring, alerting, team collaboration, and incident management, have become essential for any organization looking to stay competitive in today’s fast-paced technological landscape.

A platform like Squadcast leverages all of these core features and more, allowing an organization to effectively reduce its MTTA and MTTR, meet SLOs, and adhere to error budgets.