Techstrong Survey Report on Production Change Tracking

Production Change Tracking on the Rise

Production change tracking is the missing component of observability within most organizations, but it’s just a matter of time before a majority of organizations centralize production changes for real-time troubleshooting. Whether it’s the opportunity cost of time spent troubleshooting or lost revenue, downtime incurs both direct and indirect costs. DevOps environments are complicated and troubleshooting still take up a significant portion of engineering time. And this “troubleshooting tax” actually gets higher with more advanced DevOp processes like continuous deployment.

For all their benefits, DevOps and deployment frequency increase problem diagnosis and resolution complexity. The typical approach to troubleshooting – leveraging centralized observability data – may not catch the root cause of most problems – a code or configuration change. By only relying on observability data, DevOps teams miss a key opportunity to pinpoint issues faster.

“Change data, automation and analysis must be integrated into DevOps workflows to avoid data silos and to keep pace with delivery demands placed upon software and operations teams.” – Techstrong Group

Outlook for Better Observability

A recent study by Techstrong Research surveyed their community of DevOps, cloud-native, cybersecurity and digital transformation professionals in order to gain insight into:

• Current development and observability practices
• The integration of production change tracking into DevOps pipelines
• The future plans and outlook for better observability

While most organizations are not centralizing production change tracking and integrating it into DevOps workflows, many are heading in that direction. If 76% of all performance problems can eventually be traced back to changes in the environment and most downtimes are spent looking for the change culprit, it’s time to connect the dots and track changes and relationships to troubleshoot better.