DevSecOps services make up the backbone of DevOps within an organization, providing the service metrics that support the ongoing improvement of service delivery and performance across DevOps toolchains. It’s crucial to monitor these metrics in order to detect any delays or performance issues early on. So you can make necessary adjustments to improve response time and overall service quality. An excellent way to do this is by creating a DevOps dashboard using Google Sheets as an inexpensive and easy-to-manage solution that offers several benefits over more complex products such as Splunk and Dynatrace.
Introduction to DevOps
The notion of DevOps often sparks confusion among business leaders and IT professionals who are tasked with delivering applications and services. People often have trouble understanding what culture, engineering, and continuous improvement mean, let alone how to apply them. The purpose of a DevOps dashboard is to help teams visualize key metrics that can give them visibility into their progress toward achieving end goals. With that in mind, here are some tips for creating your own tool and understanding its value as you move forward.
Overview of DevOps
The goal of DevOps is to reduce cycle time between development and operations through automation and monitoring. While there are many different definitions of DevOps, here we’ll look at two well-known definitions: The authors of The Phoenix Project define DevOps as the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity—continuously. They go on to say that some use security practices that originate in information security (infosec) or elsewhere outside their group but don’t work in their particular environment.
The DevSecOps Manifesto
1. Leaning in over Always Saying, “No.”
2. Data & Security Science over Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
3. Open Contribution & Collaboration over Security-Only Requirements.
4. Relying on empowered development teams more than security specialists.
5. Consumable Security Services with APIs over Mandated Security Controls & Paperwork.
6. Business Driven Security Scores over Rubber Stamp Security.
7. 24×7 Proactive Security Monitoring over Reacting after being Informed of an Incident.
8. Shared Threat Intelligence over Keeping Info to ourselves.
9. Compliance Operations over Clipboards & Checklists.
What makes a good DevOps Dashboard
For starters, it’s important to understand what makes a good dashboard, regardless of whether or not you’re interested in creating your own. A good dashboard should be easy to read and visually appealing. It should show information that’s valuable and relevant—not extraneous details that get in the way of understanding key metrics. Finally, it should tell a story; ideally, one that shows progress toward your team’s short-term goals.
Tools Used to Create Your Own
Using 3rd party software to create your own dashboard is risky. In many cases, organizations that try to reinvent devops with their own custom-built solutions end up creating complex and brittle systems that are challenging to manage and maintain, and in some cases lead to critical outages. I know of one large organization whose failure to get a new website up resulted in an entire year’s worth of lost leads for a major enterprise, costing them $15 million. Luckily there are plenty of great tools available that can serve as building blocks for DevSecOps dashboards. Here’s just three
Downloadable Template
It’s important to set goals and KPIs that make sense for your organization, and to collect data in ways that will be meaningful for employees. If your organization is just starting out with devops, it may be helpful to look at existing dashboards from other organizations—the Cloud Native Computing Foundation offers a great resource on its site. It also provides an example of a security dashboard based on open-source tools like Prometheus and Grafana. You can take inspiration from their examples, or build something completely unique depending on your company’s specific needs.
Why are dashboards important?
Dashboards are an easy way to monitor multiple metrics and give you an overall understanding of how your team is performing. The most common use case is IT dashboards, where it’s important to be able to quickly analyze how your servers and network are behaving. When something goes wrong—or when something has gone really well—you want to be sure you have immediate visibility into what’s happening. A devops dashboard can help you with that by aggregating data from across all of your services, both development and operations; from there, it’s easier to spot bottlenecks or breakdowns in communication.
How do DevOps Security Practices differ from other Security Approaches?
DevOps security or DevSecOps is a holistic mindset approach rather followed by community-driven effort than a one-person size fits all approach in the standard security world. DevSecOps Tools focuses on building secure software by implementing security standards at every part of the DevOps pipeline from developing to the source code by deploying the application. At the same time, standard security practices start after the deployment of the application. With DevSecOps and DevSecOps tools, organizations require every person responsible for software delivery. And implement their own security practices. Each one is responsible for security measures.
DevOps Security focuses on the point of delivering secure software using continuous delivery architectures. It is a community-driven effort and strategy driven by learning and experiments. Standard Security measures follow the practice of “ just a means of adding security into continuous delivery,“ whereas DevSecOps tools follow the practice of “ building security and compliance into the software.
Where should dashboards be placed in your organization?
As you’re designing your dashboard, keep in mind where and how it will be used. This is important because some elements of your design will vary depending on who will be using it—and for what purpose. A different dashboard might need to fit onto an iPhone screen or provide up-to-the-minute information about overseas shipments. But, no matter who’s going to use your dashboard or what purpose it serves. It’s crucial that the information remains relevant and easy to access. And if you think about these details beforehand, users are more likely to do something with what they see on their screens. One way to make sure that all users can use your dashboard easily is by creating dynamic dashboards that can display multiple charts without overwhelming them with options or data points.
The Benefits of DevOps:
There are many benefits of DevOps. It includes faster delivery of features, improved communication and collaboration between teams. It also promotes better quality of code, and many other benefits.
Faster Delivery of Features: One of the main benefits of this approach is that it enables organizations to deliver new features and updates to their customers much faster. This is possible because DevOps automates many tasks that would otherwise require manual work, such as server provisioning and code deployment.
Conclusion
While there’s no standard way of implementing these tools and strategies across an organization. Understanding what’s available is a critical first step in figuring out which might be right for your team. In many cases, basic dashboards are all you need to start making meaningful changes. But just as important as choosing among them is picking a few. So that you can make sense of the information they offer. If you have one or two, use them; look at them frequently. Ask yourself why it would help if one was displaying different information than another. You’ll have an easier time fine-tuning your monitoring and improving your apps in DevOps if you understand the contents of each page on your dashboard.
