Hey everyone! I'm curious about how common it is for DevOps Engineers to have little to no experience with monitoring. Back when I started my career as a system administrator, monitoring was crucial because there weren't any specific roles for it. But since transitioning to DevOps, I've hardly dealt with monitoring tasks, as it's usually handled by SREs. Now, I'm finding this lack of experience is hindering my job search, despite having over 10 years of work experience and 7 years in DevOps. How typical is this situation?
5 Answers
I've noticed that too. During interviews, they dive deep into topics like Monitoring, Security in Pipelines, and SLO/SLIs—things that you’d expect could be delegated more typically to SREs, even for DevOps positions.
Honestly, I'm in the same boat—I would rather avoid monitoring tasks. I’ve worked with tools like Nagios and Grafana, but it’s never been my favorite part of the job, and it shows in my job search too.
I honestly doubt that a bit of missing monitoring experience is what’s keeping you from getting hired. Setting up something like a Grafana dashboard isn’t difficult. As a DevOps engineer, you should have a good grasp of important metrics beyond just CPU and memory. I whipped up a Grafana configuration for Kubernetes recently; it took maybe a few hours. So, I wouldn’t stress too much about not having direct monitoring experience—it shouldn’t be a dealbreaker.
With so many candidates out there, employers tend to raise their expectations while keeping salaries down. It’s a tough market for sure.
When it comes to monitoring, it’s pretty varied. There are different types: reactive monitoring (like Datadog or Grafana), proactive monitoring (which involves analyzing data to spot potential issues), and predictive monitoring (where you use logging to catch problems before they escalate). It’s worth clarifying which type of monitoring you’re considering since this can really affect how companies view your background in interviews.
I mean all the observability aspects: monitoring, alerting, logging, and tracing. I’ve done quite a bit of work with these tools and made various proof of concepts, but it seems everyone wants someone with hands-on experience.
Tell me about it! I’m also finding it tough to land a new role because of that.