Release It!, 2nd Edition

Platform and Ecosystem

Suppose we decide to put monitoring into the platform. There’ll surely be a monitoring team within the platform team. Would we expect that team to respond to application alerts? Definitely not! Instead, that team should provide the capability that others then use. In other words, the monitoring team doesn’t do the monitoring, it provides the ability for others to do their own monitoring. This is a mental shift from ownership of the domain to offering a service to customers.

Seems like an easy enough heuristic, but it leads immediately to a change in the way we view responsibilities. For example, it used to be common for the monitoring team to implement all the specific monitors, triggers, alerts, and thresholds. That ...