Infographic Boils Down the Key Uses of a DevOps Toolchain

As DevOps faces mainstream IT expansion, there’s a lot of debate over which tools and systems are must-have, indispensable integrations for a well-oiled toolchain. However, spending too much time trying to compare the individual components can cause us to lose sight of what’s most important: the purpose your toolchain should ultimately serve.

This new infographic by xMatters is a spot-on outline of three critical functions a DevOps toolchain should fulfill to best serve your organization. The first is to leverage your toolchain to resolve individual product defects, and utilize automation to generate dependable, targeted alerts to your team about major IT incidents. This will not only improve the speed with which you resolves issues, but help to proactively sidestep potential problems from escalating and damaging your customer experience.

The second is to use your toolchain is to further refine your management of major incidents, and facilitate the rapid and automatic progression from pinpointing critical events, escalating targeted communications to the right team members, and following through until the issues have been resolved. xMatters highlights that it’s especially important these communications are delivered only to the appropriate team members; mass notifications — particularly to teams of hundreds or thousands of personnel — are ineffective and don’t do anything to combat alert fatigue.

Lastly, xMatters reminds us that your toolchain is meant to help you innovate faster by driving continuous build, test, release, and deploy. Combining monitoring, diagnostics, and continuous testing can help your organization ensure rapid delivery and follow best practices for agile development. Decentralized version control, for instance, is used by 85% of software organizations because it can help streamline the development process tremendously.

Remember that keeping your big-picture toolchain end-goals in mind can help inform individual tool choice in the first place!