Saturday 16 March 2013

DevOps 101: from production errors (ouch!) to Engineering

I decided to name this series after the classic introductive American class: 101. We are talking about DevOps (with Visual Studio ALM 2012), so DevOps 101 Smile
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KABOOM!
The first step toward Developer Operations is allowing production errors to get intercepted and stored into Work Item Types for the Engineering team. As we saw in the last post, there is a new, dedicated WIT for that: Operational Issue.
Once we hit a bug in production, one (or more, depending on what caused the error) alert is raised. This alert can be sent via email, too, in order to trigger both a formal (via the SCOM Console) and informal (via email) communication.
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It’s not just a simple ‘alert’: it features all the information we are going to push to the Operational Issue.
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Once we modify the status to Assigned to Engineering, it is pushed. Aside from all the tabs (it wouldn’t be a 101 post otherwise Smile) let’s have a look at the Alert Description box. It features an hyperlink to an URL which uses port 45451. What’s that?!
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It’s the result of the Microsoft’s acquisition of AVICode. A full-featured application monitoring system has been integrated inside SCOM, and the information it gathers are rendered by this service, capturing every kind of stuff you can think at the surface level.
Beware: an IntelliTrace file is added to the work item, but it’s not that huge. We are going to see in a separate post why, and how to integrate IntelliTrace in our DevOps workflow.
The next post is going to the other side, so what happens in Engineering when a Operational Issue is raised in Team Foundation Server. Stay tuned Winking smile

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