Enforce DevOps best practices and eliminate production errors!

Stelios Sotiriadis,4 min read

We’re developers, and we love best practices—but let’s be honest, we often bypass them.

And you know what? That’s okay! You are not alone!

This popular GitHub post resonates:

People will forget all your contributions and hard work but not the time you were forced to push into the main branch!

Image description

Why?

Because sometimes speed, urgency, or unforeseen challenges force us to take shortcuts. The real problem isn’t occasional bypassing—it’s when these bypasses go unnoticed, untracked, and unaddressed.

Best practices aren’t about perfection; they’re about consistency, visibility, and accountability.

That’s why we rely on an ever-growing stack of tools to automate our processes. We trust these tools! For example:

But here’s the issue:

These tools operate in isolation—they don’t share context.

In a recent interview, a tech leader shared:

“A failed test in GitHub doesn’t stop a Jira ticket from being marked as ‘Done’.”

That’s a bad practice—and it leads to teams firefighting 500 errors in production, blindfolded and in the dark.

Who knows what caused the error?

Without clear visibility and actionable insights, finding answers feels impossible.

Errors don’t exist in isolation—they leave clues scattered across different tools. The challenge is connecting those dots and focusing on the right clues.


The Solution: Enforceable Best Practices

As a team, we must always know what’s happening across our toolchains.

This means:


How Can Warestack Help You Monitor and Enforce Best Practices?

Warestack is a free DevOps tool that helps teams monitor and enforce best practices across events like issues, pull requests, and deployment reviews.

We do this in three simple steps:

Step 1: Connect Your Tools

Integrate tools like GitHub, Jira, and more to access key events as a team directly from Warestack.

Step 2: Enable Best Practices to Monitor

Enable and customize pre-built best practices—or suggest new ones!

Examples:

Example Configuration

Customize rules to match your team’s workflow, and pick severity and minimum assignees!

Customization Example

Step 3: Monitor Violations

Head to the Monitoring dashboard to see flagged violations, complete with severity levels. Access info such as who, when, what.

Monitoring Dashboard

Example: Pull Request Review

Everyone on the team can access the dashboard and stay aware of potential production risks.

PR Review Example

Example: Deployment Review

This deployment was self-approved by the same person who initiated it—a clear bad practice!

Deployment Review Example


What’s Next for Warestack?

We’re currently focusing on enforcement, such as canceling events with unmet conditions. For example, force-cancel a deployment if it was self-approved by the same person who initiated it. This will force the initiator to request the deployment review from a different team member to ensure independent verification. This ensures accountability and visibility.

That release will come out soon!

Also, we will soon support custom best practices and evaluate them against industry standards. Soon, we’ll help you identify if your team’s custom standards align with global best practices.

Further, DORA metrics are a key focus for us! Soon, we’ll help you monitor critical metrics like deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate and take proactive decisions to prevent issues. For example, if a GitHub workflow run fails, Warestack can automatically move the associated ticket back to “In Progress” and notify the team on Slack!


Do You Like What We Are Building?

Then we’d love your help!

We’re also looking for pilot users!

We’re creating a community hub where anyone can suggest a best practice.

If you’re interested, reach out, and let’s chat!

Thanks for reading, Stelios

Warestack

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