So you are ready to deploy a new version of your software, but how do you know if it is going to go well or not? What do you monitor during the deployment and what criteria do you use to make sure it was successful?
The first thing to keep in mind is that a successful deployment is not just about using popular development tools or tech stacks. Every application depends on other services such as databases, message queues, web servers, caches, and storage systems. If any of these services have a problem it will negatively impact your application. Though there are tried and tested tools aimed to improve productivity and efficiency. Upgrades to these services will also likely impact your application and should be monitored closely.
And to take care of that, there are certain things you should monitor during software deployment. And here in this blog, we are going to discuss some of the important ones.
8 things you should monitor during software deployment
1. Know your error rates
The first thing to monitor during a software deployment is the error rate. It is estimated that 70% of software deployments will experience some kind of error, ranging from minor issues to major problems. The number of errors can vary widely depending on how you define an error and how long you monitor it. For example, if a program won’t open, this could be considered an error; but if the application works fine once it’s opened, there may not be a problem at all. Be sure to understand which types of issues are defined as errors when monitoring your systems so that you aren’t misled into thinking there is an issue when there isn’t one.
2. Compare web traffic volume and page load times
During a software deployment, the most important things to monitor are the site traffic volume, the performance of your server, and whether or not there are any errors. When you begin deployment, load testing is extremely beneficial for checking your server equipment’s capacity. Load testing measures a system’s ability to deal with its normal workload. The crucial thing to remember during this period is that if you encounter any problems, you should stop and notify your webmaster immediately so they can help you debug it before attempting another deployment.
Web traffic volume and page load times are important metrics to monitor during software deployment. These two sets of metrics provide insight into customers’ experiences as they browse the website, with web traffic volume indicating how many people are using the website, and page load times indicating how fast the pages load. Monitoring these two metrics can give you an idea of what’s going on in terms of traffic and performance at any given time.
3. Track your apdex or customer satisfaction scores
A key metric to track during software deployment and monitoring is the Apdex score. The Apdex score measures how quickly a customer’s request is fulfilled, compared with their satisfaction level with the response. This can help you determine whether your organization is providing customer service that meets or exceeds customer expectations.
Apdex is a metric that helps you understand how well your system is delivering the services that customers want and need. Apdex measures how quickly requests are processed, the number of errors or unexpected results you get, and the time it takes to respond to customers.
4. Server counts, load & CPU usage
Server counts, load, and CPU usage should be monitored during a software deployment as it is a key indicator of the health of your user community. To identify spikes in server counts, load, or CPU usage that require investigation, you can set thresholds for these metrics and define actions to take when they are exceeded.
The number of servers monitored during a deployment depends on the magnitude of your project. If you’re deploying a major upgrade that affects all users, or if your environment has many thousands of desktops and servers, you should monitor the performance of each.
5. Database and SQL query performance
One of the most important aspects of an application running in a production environment is performance. Monitoring the performance of SQL queries and databases can help to maintain an optimal level of performance to ensure that your application is being used by your users without any noticeable delays or degradation of service.
Many factors can impact the database performance, such as The number of concurrent users, whether there are bottlenecks for resources such as CPU or disk space, or whether there are issues with the SQL queries themselves. To properly monitor these factors in a production environment requires tools that provide data collection at scale, storing data in a centralized location (or a location where it can be accessed) such as Amazon Redshift.
6. Performance of all application dependencies
When there is a performance issue with your application, the first question that comes to mind is whether it’s an issue with the application itself or with one of the components it depends on. Are the databases especially slow? What about the queues? Timing out connections to any of these external components will result in failures for your users—not to mention, you can’t get a complete picture of your performance without knowing how things are going with these dependencies. Because of this, it’s critical to monitor the health of all your dependencies in addition to monitoring your performance.
In particular, make sure you’re paying close attention to the health of any component that has a lot of traffic flowing through it. If you’re not sure where to start, try looking at the metrics for each component and figuring out which ones are handling more than their fair share. This may be most obvious when looking at throughput for databases and queues—if a component is getting overloaded with requests, likely, it will eventually cause you some problems.
7. Internal communications (Slack)
It may seem obvious, but the better your communications are within your team, the smoother your deployment will be.
When you’re deploying a new release of the software, a lot may go wrong—some of which are inevitable, and some of which are preventable. But you can’t prevent what you don’t know about. If something goes wrong during deployment, everyone on the team must be made aware of it right away so that they can take appropriate action to assess the situation and get things back to normal as fast as possible. Good internal communications are key to keeping everyone on the same page about your company’s software deployment.
8. Regression testing
As you try out new features on software, it’s important to keep an eye out for any unwanted side effects. This can be the hardest part of deployment because there may be no obvious issues that arise at first glance. However, just because there were no major problems does not mean that everything is fine.
It’s possible that even a small change can have unwanted repercussions in the future. For example, if you’re creating an ecommerce feature and you remove some unnecessary code in the checkout process, it might seem like a good idea at the time since there’s less clutter and more code to maintain. But what if one of those pieces of code was preventing someone from completing their purchase? You may think that since you’ve never heard about any complaints, then everything must be fine—but then months later you start getting reports of abandoned purchases. When something like this happens, it can be hard to narrow down what exactly went wrong and find what needs to be fixed.
That’s why regression software testing is so important: it helps you spot these kinds of errors before they are ever reported by users. It involves going through a website or piece of software as though you were a customer who had never used it before and looking for anything unusual or unexpected.
Takeaway
In this blog, we discussed some of the things you should monitor while your software is getting deployed. Monitoring your application during deployment can help you to know when the deployment is done and when something hasn’t gone as expected. This can help a lot in quickly fixing the issues that may have occurred because of a deployment.
Apart from the above logs that you should monitor closely during a software deployment to keep an eye on what is happening, there are high chances for an unexpected error to occur frequently during the deployment, you need to figure out why it is happening and fix the problem before it ends up impacting the users of your application.
