The goal of this blog is to share some practices and experiences for creating Continuous Deployment Dashboards with SAP Focused RUN.
Context
This content is based on the tools and the concepts operated for the deployment of SAP Cloud ALM.
SAP Cloud ALM is the platform for the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for the Intelligent Enterprise. The scope and the type of the components of the Intelligent Suite requires an ALM solution accessible as SaaS with a very fast innovation cycle.
From a business perspective SAP Cloud ALM needs to be able to Deploy Daily.
Continuous deployment
Daily deployment relies on an End-To-End SaaS Framework covering project processes, best practices, and tools to support Continuous Deployment.
It means that all software changes go through a deployment pipeline and are released in production automatically. This pipeline relies on 3 main processes:
- Continuous Delivery.
- Continuous Deployment.
- Continuous Monitoring.
Continuous Deployment Dashboards is required to bring transparency and control across each phase of the DevOps lifecycles. They report on the health of services as they move from development to production.
Continuous Integration
The automation tools supporting continuous integration purposes, are based on pipeline jobs integrating and validating commits to obtain ready to be deployed builds.
Those jobs are controlled with the Health Monitoring availability monitoring capabilities of SAP Focused RUN.
Health Monitoring provides real-time status with alerting. In addition, detailed and history views are accessible for each of the monitored pipeline jobs providing access to availability and performance metrics.
Continuous Testing
The continuous testing platform uses one or many automated test infrastructures to execute test cases on regular basis. The nature and the execution frequency of the tests depend on the target staging environment involved during the different steps of the deployment pipeline.
As an example, developments staging are typically configured with a short execution cycle of 15 minutes. The test environments would use an hourly cycle and the production environments could be executed on a bi-daily frequency.
The tests results are then injected into the Focused RUN Synthetic User Monitoring (SUM) in test reports dashboards organized by staging environment:
Details of single test execution can be accessed for each staging environment:
Test reports with screenshots in case failure execution are also accessible as shown below for root cause analysis.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous Monitoring will notify DevOps teams of specific event situations occurring in the production environment.
Application and Infrastructure Monitoring are performed with the different capabilities of SAP Focused RUN as Health Monitoring, and User Monitoring:
- Health Monitoring captures business services uptime and responses time.
- Real User Monitoring tracks application performances by providing real-time feedback on user’s interactions.
- Synthetic User Monitoring provides key metrics to measure the reliability and the continuity of key business applications and APIs.
