VSTS Gems- Release gates

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Gem
Release gates- Integrate continuous monitoring into your release pipelines

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Area

Release (You may need to enable Gates in your profile Preview features list.)

TFS Availability

TFS 2018.2

Value

  • Pre-deployment gates to validate that the target instance do not receive requests
  • Improve MTTD (Mean time to detect)
  • Embrace the (real) early feedback principal
  • Post-deployment for Ensuring the app in a release is healthy after deployment

Continuous monitoring is an integral part of DevOps pipelines.
Enterprises adopt various tools for automatic detection of app health in production and for keeping track of customer reported incidents.
Until now, approvers had to manually monitor the health of the apps from all the systems before promoting the release. However, Release Management now supports integrating continuous monitoring into release pipelines. Use this to ensure the system repeatedly queries all the health signals for the app until all of them are successful at the same time, before continuing the release.

You start by defining pre-deployment or post-deployment gates in the release definition. Each gate can monitor one or more health signals corresponding to a monitoring system of the app. Built-in gates are available for “Azure monitor (application insight) alerts” and “Work items”. You can integrate with other systems using the flexibility offered through Azure functions.

Gated releases

At the time of execution, the Release starts to sample all the gates and collect health signals from each of them. It repeats the sampling at each interval until signals collected from all the gates in the same interval are successful.

Sampling interval

Initial samples from the monitoring systems may not be accurate, as not enough information may be available for the new deployment. The “Delay before evaluation” option ensures the Release does not progress during this period, even if all samples are successful.

No agents or pipelines are consumed during sampling of gates. See the documentation for release gates for more information.

 

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