By: James Hunter

Introduction

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, organizations are constantly seeking ways to improve their software delivery processes. The integration of IBM DevOps Loop and IBM Instana offers a powerful solution that combines the best of DevOps and observability, enabling teams to deliver high-quality software faster and more reliably. This blog explores the business and technical value of using these technologies together, the challenges they address, and provides practical examples and best practices for implementation.

Business Value

Problems Solved:

In the modern software development landscape, teams often face a myriad of challenges that hinder their efficiency and productivity. Toolchain sprawl and complexity can make it difficult to manage disparate tools and data, leading to inefficiencies and longer release cycles. Security breaches, compliance risks, and downtime are constant threats that can have significant business impacts. Manual steps and disjointed data tools can cause miscommunication, longer release cycles, and quality issues.

Business Benefits:

IBM DevOps Loop addresses these challenges by providing a single, open platform that allows teams to get control of disparate tools and data from across multiple projects. It automates and governs the delivery of code, aligning business goals to delivery activities. By maximizing automation of testing and deployment and using intelligent decision gates to prevent bad code from going live, DevOps Loop accelerates time-to-market and reduces human error.

Instana complements DevOps Loop by providing real-time insights into the health and performance of applications and infrastructure. This enables teams to quickly identify and resolve issues, improving application performance and availability. By accelerating incident resolution and reducing downtime, Instana helps organizations optimize resource utilization and reduce costs.

Together, these technologies improve productivity, enhance collaboration, and provide better decision-making capabilities. Project and program managers can manage their teams more efficiently, reducing rework and increasing delivery speed. Program leaders can get up-to-date information about the state of delivery, making it easier to make decisions that reduce risk and help teams deliver high-quality solutions. Test leaders can ensure everyone understands the state of quality of a project at any time, increasing test coverage and ensuring any issues are put into their delivery lifecycle with the information needed for them to be fixed as fast as possible. CI/CD leaders can minimize risk by ensuring all necessary software components at the correct versions are all in the right place at the right time.

Technical Value

Complementary Features:

IBM DevOps Loop and IBM Instana offer a range of complementary features that work together to enhance the software delivery process. DevOps Loop provides a comprehensive suite of tools for planning and work item management, design, development, build automation, test automation, deployment automation, release orchestration, and value stream analysis and reporting. It integrates out of the box with IBM and RedHat tools and technologies, making it easy to get started.

Instana, on the other hand, provides automated discovery and monitoring of application components, including microservices and containers, without requiring manual configuration. It offers real-time performance monitoring, providing detailed insights into application performance, including metrics, traces, logs, and events. Instana's AI-powered root cause analysis helps teams quickly identify and resolve issues, enhancing the reliability of DevOps Loop's delivery processes.

Technical Advantages:

The integration of DevOps Loop and Instana provides several technical advantages. Instana's full-stack monitoring, combined with DevOps Loop's comprehensive insights and DoRA metrics, provides a holistic view of the application environment. This end-to-end visibility enables teams to identify and address issues more effectively, improving application performance and availability.

Instana's AI-powered intelligent alerting notifies teams of potential problems before they impact end-users, complementing DevOps Loop's intelligent decision gates. This proactive approach to incident management helps teams resolve issues faster and reduce downtime.

Instana also helps automate incident remediation, enabling teams to resolve issues faster and reduce downtime. This is particularly useful in complex environments where manual incident resolution can be time-consuming and inefficient.

Challenges Addressed

Pain Points:

Before using these technologies, teams often struggle with manual processes and disjointed tools, leading to miscommunication and longer release cycles. Without real-time performance monitoring, teams may miss critical issues that impact application availability and user experience. Traditional methods of incident resolution can be time-consuming and inefficient, leading to prolonged downtime.

Solutions:

IBM DevOps Loop addresses these challenges by automating and integrating various stages of the delivery lifecycle, reducing manual steps and improving efficiency. It provides a single, open platform that allows teams to get control of disparate tools and data from across multiple projects, automate and govern the delivery of code, and align business goals to delivery activities.

Instana complements DevOps Loop by providing real-time insights into the health and performance of applications and infrastructure. This enables teams to quickly identify and resolve issues, improving application performance and availability. Instana's AI-powered incident remediation helps teams resolve issues faster, reducing downtime and improving user experience.

Real-world Example

Scenario:

Imagine a scenario where a financial institution deploys an update to its online banking platform. Without solid DevOps practices and an observability solution, a two-week search for the root cause of a system outage ensues, leading to significant business impact. Customers expect the services they depend on to be available 100% of the time, and when a service is not available, customers have options and may explore alternative solutions. The result could be a reduction in revenue for the business and negative impact to brand loyalty.

Solution:

By integrating IBM DevOps Loop and IBM Instana, the institution can create repeatable and reliable deployment processes from development to production. DevOps Loop ensures consistent deployments, while Instana provides real-time insights into application performance, enabling teams to detect and resolve issues quickly.

DevOps Loop sends release markers to Instana, notifying SREs of changes and enabling them to observe the impact of releases in real-time. This accelerates insight on release impact, reduces mean time to detection, and ensures the site is reliable for clients. If the issue observed is such that a quick rollback to a working version of the application is needed, DevOps Loop allows for easy selection of the previous snapshot or component version(s), helping to avoid downtime and improve Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

Outcome:

The integration of DevOps Loop and Instana enhances collaboration between development and operations teams, accelerates insight on release impact, and decreases mean time to recovery. This helps the institution deliver high-quality software faster and more reliably, ultimately driving business success.

Best Practices

Define Clear Governance Rules:

Customize your workflow in DevOps Loop to meet your governance rules, ensuring compliance and security. This includes using AI to turn ideas into actions, generating reports on status and tasks, and automating repeatable delivery processes.

Leverage AI for Decision Making:

Use AI-powered insights from both DevOps Loop and Instana to make informed decisions about deployment risks and issues. This includes AI guidance on deployment risks and issues, intelligent gates to stop bad code from going live, and predicting delivery risk with AI analytics.

Implement Quality Gates:

Develop quality gates in your pipelines to detect issues earlier in the software development lifecycle (shift-left). This includes automated API, UI, and performance testing, service virtualization of missing components and integration endpoints, and generating tests and test data.

Monitor End-User Experience:

Use Instana's end-user experience monitoring to gain granular insights into user journeys and preferences. This includes monitoring the end-to-end digital experience of applications, websites, and mobile apps, and providing context on how specific business processes are connected to and impacted by their underlying systems.

Additional Information

Trends and Insights:

• Shift-Left Testing: The trend of shifting testing to the left in the software development lifecycle is gaining traction, as it helps detect issues earlier and reduces rework.
• AI in DevOps: The integration of AI in DevOps is transforming the way teams deliver software, enabling faster, more reliable, and more secure deployments.
• Observability: Observability is becoming a critical component of modern DevOps practices, providing the visibility needed to ensure application performance and availability.

Conclusion

The integration of IBM DevOps Loop and IBM Instana offers a comprehensive solution that enhances DevOps and site reliability engineering practices. By combining the strengths of these technologies, organizations can improve collaboration, accelerate insight on release impact, and decrease mean time to recovery. Whether you're a project manager, program leader, test leader, or CI/CD leader, the combination of DevOps Loop and Instana can help you deliver high-quality software faster and more reliably, ultimately driving business success.

By leveraging the automation and governance capabilities of DevOps Loop and the real-time monitoring and AI-driven insights of Instana, teams can overcome the challenges of toolchain sprawl, security risks, and manual processes. This integration not only streamlines the software delivery lifecycle but also ensures that applications are performing optimally and meeting the needs of end-users.

In summary, IBM DevOps Loop and IBM Instana together provide a powerful platform for modern software development. They address the pain points faced by teams, offer significant business and technical value, and enable organizations to stay competitive in an ever-evolving digital landscape. By adopting these technologies and following best practices, you can transform your DevOps processes, improve application performance, and deliver exceptional user experiences.

Schedule a live demo to see how IBM DevOps Loop and Instana help teams detect issues faster, reduce downtime, and deliver reliable software.