Wondering what the difference is between observability and monitoring? In this post, we explain how they are related, why they are important, and some suggested tools that can help. The difference between observability and monitoring is that observability is the ability to understand a system’s state from its outputs, often referred to as understanding the “unknown unknowns”.

It's time to break down the silos separating SREs from security engineers.

4 best practices for breaking down silos and establishing a culture of shared responsibility toward reliability.

In my past experience as an SRE I’ve learned some valuable lessons about how to respond and learn from incidents. Declare and run retros for the small incidents. It's less stressful, and action items become much more actionable. Decrease the time it takes to analyze an incident. You'll remember more, and will learn more from the incident. Alert on pain felt by people — not computers. The only reason we declare incidents at all is because of the people on the other side of them.

DevOps and SRE are domains with rapid growth and frequent innovations. With this blog you can explore the latest trends in DevOps, SRE and stay ahead of the curve. The past decade has seen widespread adoption of DevOps methodologies in software development. Unsurprisingly, as the needs of users change, DevOps techniques have evolved as well. In this blog we will look at the trends that are most likely to have a significant impact in the coming years.

Do blameless retrospectives (or postmortems) help your team? We will explain what they are, if they really work, and how to do them right. A blameless postmortem (or retrospective) is a post-incident document that helps teams figure out why an incident happened, and brainstorm how to improve the process to prevent similar incidents from happening again. In most engineering organizations, everyone agrees that in complex systems, failure is inevitable.

Error Budgets That Work for You. Plus Support for New Relic Metrics and NR Query Language Did you know that error budget policy is the key to making SLOs actionable? In fact, Twitter’s engineering team did not successfully adopt SLOs until they introduced error budgets. SLOs enable teams to quantify customer happiness, and error budgets enable teams to make data-backed tradeoffs between reliability and feature velocity. We believe that teams optimizing for reliability must adopt both.

Rootly is on a mission to create a world where maintaining reliability is frictionless, delightful, and accessible to anyone. Making resolving and learning from incidents every organizations superpower.

From network problems to computer failures, a variety of incidents can disrupt operations for systems in outer space.

We’ve always advocated that every company can benefit from a blameless culture . Fostering a blameless culture can profoundly boost your organization in powerful ways, from employee retention to developer velocity and innovation. However, there’s an elephant in the room when we talk about blamelessness with executives: accountability. When things go wrong, people still need to get fired, right?