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Optimizing APM operations using custom MetricSets

 

As part of your DevOps lifecycle, you use canary deployment methodology and introduce new versions of microservice code releases on a daily basis.   

  • If you're an SRE, you need to accelerate the ability to identify application degradations caused from microservice releases introduced downstream, even when you have hundreds of microservices being updated by multiple development teams.
  • If you're a service developer, you need to accelerate your ability to quickly identify degradations (MTTD) for your service release deployments. You also need to understand what business applications and workflows are being impacted and quickly restore (MTTR) to minimize risks to the business.

This article is part of the Splunk Use Case Explorer for Observability, which is designed to help you identify and implement prescriptive use cases that drive incremental business value. It explains the solution using a fictitious example company, called CSCorp, that hosts a cloud native application called Online Boutique. In the AIOps lifecycle described in the Use Case Explorer, this article is part of Application monitoring.

You can use use Splunk APM MetricSets to identify and respond to frequent microservice code releases, helping you to mitigate business risks using DevOps canary or blue/green deployment methodologies. This drives operational optimization and excellence within your organization, resulting in MTTD and MTTR improvements.

In this example, OnlineBoutique consumes many microservices to run the online sales portal. The ‘payment service’ development team introduces rapid releases as part of the DevOps CI/CD pipeline. They just released v350.10 as part of their canary based deployment methodology.

The following statements are true of CSCorp:

  • paymentservice microservice is used by many applications at CSCorp.
  • version tag is a standard at CSCorp.  This is instrumented within code for all services.
  • App_name tag is standard at CSCorp.  This is instrumented at all front end services for each application 
  • Frontend service is the main entrypoint gateway for OnlineBoutique app.

Now, watch this video to find out how you can identity and visualize application impact of canary code releases in this example. 

Next steps 

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