Incident management is a formal process, and not every alert will trigger it. — Incident management is one of the important responsibilities of the Site Reliability Engineering team. It’s the on-call person who gets alerted to an incident and starts the investigation. …

The burn rate is a calculation of how fast an issue is burning through the error budget. — The concept of alerting is pretty simple. When an SLI tells you you’re consuming an error budget, you need to get a human involved to protect your SLO. The mechanics are fairly straightforward too. In my previous articles, I have discussed How to track Service Level Objectives, Site Reliability Engineering…

SRE recommends a baseline set of metrics to monitor called the four golden signals. — Monitoring is the automated collection of data from your systems which feeds your SLIs (Service Level Indicators) and tells you if your SLOs (Service Level Objectives) are on track. Actually, SRE recommends a baseline set of metrics to monitor called the four golden signals: Latency, Traffic, Errors, and Saturation.

The Service Level Indicator is the ongoing measurement of your system that tells you whether you’re meeting your objective — In my article on how do you keep track of the actual Service Level Objectives? I discussed ways to track your SLO, which is the target level of reliability. Whereas, the Service Level Indicator, SLI, is the ongoing measurement of your system that tells you whether you’re meeting your objective…

Service health is defined in terms of multiple service level objectives, SLOs, which are user-focused rather than operations-focused. — There are crucial questions for making sure your services run well enough without excessive maintenance effort, for example; What service level are your apps currently running at? What service level does the business expect? How do you monitor the actual service level?

The outcome must be worth the investment — Identifying and measuring toil is the first step to addressing it effectively. Data is your friend here because you need to put together a case for removing the toil. We should automate this because it’s boring isn’t really a good justification. Especially if the boring task takes 5 minutes once…

Toil has a negative impact on people and systems — You know that feeling when you have a constant stream of work coming in and you keep powering through it. But it feels like you never get anything done. That type of work is toil, and SRE has explicit practices and guidelines to help keep it to a minimum. Toil…

You need to know if something is going on with your application that affects the end‑user experience as soon as possible. — Monitoring is a foundational capability of a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team. You need to know if something is going on with your application, that affects the end‑user experience as soon as possible. Also, your monitoring should be able to help you in identifying the root cause as soon as…

Choosing the right CI system is important to the success of every product — There are three main categories of Continuous Integration (CI) Systems. Choosing the right CI system is important to the success of every product. 1. Open-source CI systems 2. Commercial vendors Offerings 3. SaaS Offerings Let me start with the open-source. There are various open-source CI systems like; · Buildbot, ·…