Editor’s note: Today we hear from Kenny Kon, an SRE Director at Sabre. Kenny shares about how they have been able to successfully adopt Google’s SRE framework by leveraging their partnership with Google Cloud. As a leader in the travel industry, Sabre Corporation is driving innovation in the global travel industry and developing solutions that help airlines, hotels, and travel agencies transform the traveler experience and satisfy the ever-evolving needs of its customers.

Prometheus, the de facto standard for Kubernetes monitoring, works well for many basic deployments, but managing Prometheus infrastructure can become challenging at scale. As Kubernetes deployments continue to play a bigger role in enterprise IT, scaling Prometheus for a large number of metrics across a global footprint has become a pressing need for many organizations.

The need for relevant and contextual telemetry data to support online services has grown in the last decade as businesses undergo digital transformation. These data are typically the difference between proactively remediating application performance issues or costly service downtime. Distributed tracing is a key capability for improving application performance and reliability, as noted in SRE best practices.

Whether you are moving your applications to the cloud or modernizing them using Kubernetes, observing cloud-based workloads is more challenging than observing traditional deployments. When monitoring on-prem monoliths, operations teams had full visibility over the entire stack and full control over how/what telemetry data is collected (from infrastructure to platform to application data).

The newly released 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report found that teams who excel at modern operational practices are 1.4 times more likely to report greater software delivery and operational performance and 1.8 times more likely to report better business outcomes. A foundational element of modern operational practices is having monitoring tooling in place to track, analyze, and alert on important metrics.

The stakes of managing Lowes.com have never been higher, and that means spotting, troubleshooting and recovering from incidents as quickly as possible, so that customers can continue to do business on our site. To do that, it’s crucial to have solid incident engineering practices in place. Resolving an incident means mitigating the impact and/or restoring the service to its previous condition.

Inevitably, in the lifetime of a service or application, developers, DevOps, and SREs will need to investigate the cause of latency. Usually you will start by determining whether it is the application or the underlying infrastructure causing the latency. You have to look for signals that indicate the performance of those resources when the issue occured.

When you are experiencing an issue with your application or service, having deep visibility into both the infrastructure and the software powering your apps and services is critical. Most monitoring services provide insights at the Virtual Machine (VM) level, but few go further. To get a full picture of the state of your application or service, you need to know what processes are running on your infrastructure.

Keeping the experience of your end user in mind is important when developing applications. Observability tools help your team measure important performance indicators that are important to your users, like uptime. It’s generally a good practice to measure your service internally via metrics and logs which can give you indications of uptime, but an external signal is very useful as well, wherever feasible.

Troubleshooting production issues with virtual machines (VMs) can be complex and often requires correlating multiple data points and signals across infrastructure and application metrics, as well as raw logs. When your end users are experiencing latency, downtime, or errors, switching between different tools and UIs to perform a root cause analysis can slow your developers down.