Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

9.3. Technical Reporting

This section provides a quick overview of some of the technical reports that can be used to assist in system monitoring, trend analysis, and incident investigation:

• Monitoring — Monitoring the system was discussed previously. However, scripts can often execute stored procedures or queries, analyze the results, and determine whether an alert is raised. For example, the application can be storing some processing state in the database. A script can execute periodically to check the processing state and raise an event. The reports can also be executed manually at regular intervals to check the processing state. These tend to be quite subtle reports required by the service delivery team.

• Trend analysis — You saw in the monitoring section that a large amount of data is being captured from the various servers around the estate. The technical reports can be executed against the collected data to provide a huge range of analysis and trending reports, including:

  • CPU utilization over time

  • Memory utilization

  • Disk utilization

  • Availability analysis (uptime/downtime)

  • Failure analysis

  When capturing the data for the monitoring requirements and rules, it is often a good idea to start thinking about how that data can be reported.

  Analysis and trending reports can also be executed against the transactional data to provide application trending analysis, including:

  • Transactions over time

  • Transaction timings

  • Auditing and security

• Incident investigation — When there is a fault with the ...