In the previous blog, we've shared initial ideas about this topic. We will continue discussing infrastructure testing in this part and provide further insights on how responsibilities shift as customers use different deployment models.
Continuous configuration automation and Infrastructure Tests with Serverspec
Continuous configuration automation (CAA) automates the deployment and configuration of settings and software for both physical and virtual data centers. Serverspec can be one of the powerful and efficient tools for validating whether the servers are configured correctly or not. Serverspec allows testing your servers' actual state by executing command locally using at least one of SSH, WinRM, Docker API, and so on. You do not need to install agent software on your servers but you can use configuration management tools like Puppet, Ansible, Chef, SaltStack, and the like. Serverspec combined with a source code management (SCM) tool of choice, and you get automated Infrastructure Tests without any hassle.
Responsibilities shift between On-Premise and Cloud Provider
Moving infrastructure from On-Premises to Cloud-Based provider means that the customer also has the responsibilities for some provided services, moving from customer to Cloud-based Service provider.
Hereinbelow, Figure 3 describes the separation of responsibilities based on Cloud Provider Service Type such as On-Promise, IaaS, PaaS, Saas:
Figure 3: Cloud Services Responsibility Matrix (source: Microsoft TechNet)
Responsibilities shift and Infrastructure Testing with Cloud IaaS Provider
Depending on the Cloud Provider Service type, responsibility for Infrastructure Testing shifts with the Service owner between Customer and Cloud-Based Service Provider. Let us consider a small example.
Customers responsibility moving from On-Premise to Cloud IaaS Provider is reduced as shown here below in Figure 4:
Figure 4
Cloud IaaS Provider is now responsible for Service Quality as shown in Figure 5:
Figure 5
In an IaaS deployment model, the Customer is not responsible for Virtualization, Servers, Storage, or Networking and does not conduct Infrastructure Testing for these Services.
Successful businesses have learned that quality assurance, functional and non-functional testing such as load and performance validation are crucial for their services' reliability. No matter what infrastructure your services and applications are hosted, simulating current and future load scenarios prevent you from performing fire fighting on production.
DYNATRACE - Infrastructure Monitoring
Dynatrace provides the most comprehensive set of infrastructure monitoring capabilities, which helps identify possible bottlenecks and issues, not only on the Application Layer but also on the Infrastructure side.
Figures 6 and 7 show Infrastructure monitoring capabilities provided by Dynatrace:
Figure 6
Figure 7
Improving MTTR with artificial intelligence
Dynatrace Infrastructure monitoring brings light into the darkness! Not only can you monitor your infrastructure, but you can also visualize the connectivity between Infrastructure components, which is real-time documentation of your infrastructure, and thereby helps in achieving a cut down in your mean time to response (MTTR) by 95%. Also, Dynatrace as a single tool allows you to correlate between infrastructure metrics and application performance for free without any effort compared to combining different tools. Overall, Dynatrace is a powerful and efficient tool that makes infrastructure monitoring easy and quick. Here are some of the features of Dynatrace:
Tailored charting and tagging capabilities on the host, database, and transaction level
Automatic root-cause analysis in your infrastructure and virtualization layers
Immediate access to log lines pointing to the root cause of system health issues
Auto-discovery of your entire technology stack in under 5 minutes
Process-specific network metrics to ensure high-quality process communications over networks
The broadest range of technology-specific process metrics out-of-the-box
Docker and OpenShift support, providing a real-time view of all the connections between containerized processes, hosts, and cloud instances
Real-time Infrastructure Health Metrics Out-of-the-box
There is a constant need to keep an eye on the data centers' health, and therefore infrastructure monitoring is another pivotal part of the process. With Dynatrace, real-time infrastructure monitoring is straightforward as it does not require manual configuration. Dynatrace provides various sets of features to the customer, making the infrastructure testing and monitoring process simple and easy.
We hope that this two-part blog on infrastructure testing was more than helpful to you. If you would like to learn more about infrastructure testing or looking for Infrastructure testing services, we would be more than happy to assist you. Click here to contact us. Performetriks is always there to assist you in your automation, performance, monitoring, and security challenges.
Keep doing the excellent work. Happy testing!
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