This blog is about how to communicate changes in your application monitoring process as your operations, environments and services evolve.

Approaching your operations with a “monitoring as code” mindset - which means automating as much of the entire observability lifecycle, including automated diagnosis, alerting and incident management, and even automated remediation - is foundational to the success of your operational technology.

Business background — changes to the application monitoring process

As software development and delivery cycles accelerate, observability up and down the entire technology stack has to adapt to keep up with those changes. Your monitoring focuses on how your systems and websites perform, how application features are deployed and how well you manage your various tools.

Changes to your application monitoring process and dashboard visualizations matter, since teams rely on those tools to determine what is going on within your critical business systems. Knowing what has changed in your environment and how those changes are included in the dashboards is very important to ensure the systems run at the optimal level.

Sumo Logic provides visibility into your business activity, development pipelines, and services. This allows you to understand workflows and where there are blockages, so you can take action to keep your business running.

Business challenge

Monitoring is vital to your operations, and as you modernize your operations, the monitoring process must change. These changes need to be well communicated, because different teams mean different business goals, business requirements and response times –– all of which may need to be adjusted accordingly.

Plus, more of us are working remotely now, so it is critical to communicate important changes. But, what changes should be reported to what teams?

Business cases

Here is a sample of questions to answer for your operations group to prepare for and adjust their processes.

• What changes to Sumo Logic queries have happened recently?

• What changes to Sumo Logic dashboards have happened recently?

• What changes to Sumo Logic data collectors or sources have happened recently?

• What changes to Sumo Logic policies have happened recently?

• What changes to Sumo Logic users or groups have happened recently?

Business solution

Sumo Logic can provide answers to the above questions, especially on the changes within your Sumo environment itself. Capturing changes in the content as a Sumo Logic source gives you full access to all of the power the platform delivers to visualize changes.

And, best of all, this can be done in several easy steps:

• Create an HTTPS collector using these steps.

• Create an HTTPS source using these steps.

• Set up an API key using these steps.

• Set up the ingest script following the readme.

• Run the script! Now you can check the source categories for the data you want to see.

Business benefits

You can track all of the configuration changes within your Sumo Logic environment, from new users to deleted content and changed collectors. Sumo Logic enables organizations to track their dashboards and queries as they change, speeding up the deployment of new content and notifying existing users of new functionality and features.

You can easily run a query that shows what abilities each user role can perform in the Sumo Logic platform, such as setting up accounts, adding and removing users, accessing and changing data collectors and configuring dashboards. Tracking user role changes will ensure the right folks have access to the right information.

A simple search lets you see who has created what dashboards, as well as who your main contributors are to dashboard creation.

You can also search and quickly find the types of roles assigned to your total list of active users.

Sumo Logic’s full-stack observability platform can help IT operations teams and SREs track all of their configuration changes within a Sumo Logic environment, and make it easy to communicate those changes to affected teams so they can update their dashboards and queries to reflect the updated processes.

Try Sumo Logic’s free trial today to see how we can help you reach your goals and maintain quality assurance today.