Log deployments and changes

Context

You have applied the [[Microservice architecture]] pattern.

Problem

How to understand the behavior of an application and troubleshoot problems?

Forces

It useful to see when deployments and other changes occur since issues usually occur immediately after a change

Solution

Log every deployment and every change to the (production) environment.

Examples

A deployment tool can, for example, publish a pseudo-metric whenever it deploys a new version of a service. This metric can then be displayed alongside other metrics enabling changes in application behavior to be correlated with deployments. See Tracking Every Release by Mike Brittain

AWS Cloud Trail provides logs of AWS API calls.

Resulting Context

This pattern has the following benefits:

• Enables deployments and changes to be easily correlated with issues leading to faster resolution.

Related patterns