So here is a great way to get pretty much every Silicon Valley developer, not to mention most forward-looking vendors, riled up. LogicMonitor, a company that offers IT monitoring for operations teams, has come out with a message that most would consider heresy. Of course, there are some pretty major vested interests going on here, but let's take a look and see how much validity there is anyway.
The thrust of LogicMonitor's thesis goes something like this. In its view, DevOps is a term used across the board these days. It implies that dev and ops have an equal share and weight in the company, and work together in equal ways to make everything work as an integrated unit. But, according to LogicMonitor, everyone knows that’s not true - IT is a need for all businesses and organizations, not the 1% of the landscape populated by a few thousand web app companies. Most companies are not development heavy or deploying a lot of code. A business that puts IT Operations first incorporates tools, correlations, monitoring technology and tools that IT operations teams actually need. Or so LogicMonitor would have us believe.
As LogicMonitor sees it, if you're a developer-heavy Silicon Valley startup, chances are you're continuously pushing production code all the time. In this world, the idea of DevOps is how you see things - most of your problems are developer/code related, and hence DevOps is a good choice. But LogicMonitor contends that this isn't the case for all those existing businesses that have significant amounts of legacy code and applications to support. For those customers, where applications are fairly static, the real problem to be solved is at the IT operations side, and DevOps dilutes that operations focus.
According to LogicMontior, operations sits at the center of the organization, and developers are just one of many teams they have to work with. Thus, monitoring should be operations-centric rather than DevOps-centric.
MyPOV
LogicMonitor is trying to gain some attention; I totally get that. What better way to get attention than to slaughter some sacred cows? But Logic Monitor's assertions don't quite ring true for me. Take this, for example. The company states that:
Unlike other companies that claim the entire world is moving to one where Dev and Ops are equal halves of the pie, we know IT Ops teams most often sit at the center of data-driven companies, and need tools to work efficiently as a team, with other teams in their company, and need support from our team of engineers, all working together to ensure they can deliver optimal performance to the people thy serve.
It seems to be a case of splitting hairs to me - the very fact that LogicMonitor conceded that operations needs to work with other teams across the company, is a tacit admission that bringing the various parts of what it takes to get an application into production is important. You can't claim operations as the preeminent department and then try and build bridges at the same time.
The other, more existential question I have with LogicMonitor's positioning is that the world is rapidly changing. Sure I can buy the notion that right here, right now, perhaps DevOps isn't really as ingrained as we'd like to think it will be. But I also like to use the growth of Uber as a touchstone for how the rate of change increases. Sure, there will be, for the foreseeable future, legacy applications sitting on operationally-focused stacks. But more and more the DevOps model of agility, incremental change and innovation will be the bottom line for organizations.
DevOps isn't dead, it's newly born and growing up fast.
