0In today's DevOps related study, people are focusing more on continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, continuous build etc. These are all processes and procedures before releasing the software into production. However, what people tend to forget is that there are devops activities even after the deployment of application in production.
Continuous Monitoring is one such major process. Once the application is deployed into production, then a monitoring has to be set up to have the application monitored under policy based application monitoring. The monitoring setup should be automated. And the monitoring should focus into finding areas of problem within the software proactively. The idea is to find all software bugs before they start affecting the actual operations. The proactive monitoring should help in finding potential bugs before users can start facing problems due to the bugs.
Example wise, you can think of a video chat application being launched. It may happen that during all kinds of testing the application succeeded and proceeded towards launch into production. However after being launched in production it is found that when multiple people join into the video chat there is a significant cpu spike in the server. While it is not impacting immediately, you know that after a while when the utilization peaks, it will start impacting video chat quality. However, you also understand that such situation will only happen only after more than 20 people join in the video chat. Which is not going to happen just now but may happen in future. Now that you have identified the potential issue in prior, you can alert your developers to fix the code which is causing the cpu utilization to spike.
This continuous monitoring feedback is an important part of today's devops. Whenever a new application is launched, if it is put under monitoring everytime, then that process is called continuous monitoring
