Monitoring development v production environment

Should you monitor a non production environment?

In large ITIL environments , the focus tends to be on the Production environment. Incident management , Problem management and the change request process are focused on Production.

It makes sense. Usually there are limited resources and ensuring there is no service impact is a top priority.

But , outages in non production environments can have a severe impact causing project deadline delays and cost impact.

Pros of monitoring a non – production environment

Developers rely on the Non-Production environment. If the environment is unavailable , developers | testers | vendor support cannot work. This is an added expense to the company.

Maintaining a similar set of alerts and responses for both environments production and non production can standardise and simplify the process . As a DBA I want to be responsible for the uptime of the database servers but this should be weighed up against resources .

Cons of monitoring a non production environment

Monitoring the non production environment is an overhead to the Operations team . The Operations team could be monitoring and responding thousands of Production servers . These servers have been (hopefully) deployed using a certified approach , including the applications installed, such as SQL Server.

Quite often the test environment is set up in a slightly different resource allocation to Production therefore a separate process is required to maintain the

Whatever decision,  deciding Monitoring non production v production it is important to have the process documented – and give thought to aspects of the controls existing in production.

The issues get more complicated in a DevOps environment. You’ll have continuous testing , continuous deployment and to validate the integrity of the first two steps we’ll have continuous monitoring.

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