LinuxCon ContainerCon CloudOpen China

“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” W. Edwards Deming was talking about statistical quality control in manufacturing but he could equally have been referring to managing modern iterative and automated software deployment pipelines and cloud-native infrastructure. Certainly there's a wealth of open source tools to capture and visualize data. However, a data strategy isn’t solely or even mostly about drawing up a long list of technical measurements and instrumenting software to capture everything. It's crucial to distinguish between metrics that relate software initiatives to positive business outcomes, the alerts needed to respond to problems now, and the data required for root cause analysis or to optimize processes over time. All data is not equal. And most data is not a metric for measuring success.