Our fourth annual SRE Report launched last week. I had the good fortune to be involved in writing and editing it this year for the first time alongside our very own driving force Leo Vasiliou and the brilliant Eveline Oehrlich at DevOps Institute (check out Eveline’s take on the report’s Key Takeaways here), in addition to a number of folks at VMware Tanzu.

From chaos engineering to monitoring and beyond, SREs rely on several key types of tools to do their jobs.

This year’s SRE from Anywhere (SREFA) brought together hundreds of registrants from around the world to gather virtually, share experiences, and network around all things SRE. We were thrilled to see so many friendly faces!

‍Resilience in Action is a podcast about all things resilience, from SRE to software engineering, to how it affects our personal lives, and more. Resilience in Action is hosted by Kurt Andersen. Kurt is a practitioner and an active thought leader in the SRE community. He speaks at major DevOps & SRE conferences and publishes his work through O'Reilly in quintessential SRE books such as Seeking SRE, What is SRE?, and 97 Things Every SRE Should Know.

Hoping you're headed towards a fun summer season and some time without masks. Let's avoid a new kind of tan-line! This newsletter shares useful industry content and an exciting Blameless product announcement. Find our fave tweets and events in the SRE and resilience engineering community. We're hiring! Check out the job openings here.

Incident severity levels are a measurement of the impact an incident has on the business. Classifying the severity of an issue is critical to decide how quickly and efficiently problems get resolved.

In its DevOps 2021 survey of global IT professionals, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) found that 95% of organizations with highly successful DevOps initiatives were predominantly decentralized and purposefully becoming more so as fast as possible (see Figure 1). This decentralization of development and DevOps teams is making site reliability engineering (SRE) both critical and difficult to achieve.

Wondering what Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are? In this article, we will explain service level objectives and how they relate to SLAs, SLIs, and error budgets. A Service Level Objective (SLO) is a reliability target, measured by a Service Level Indicator (SLI) and sometimes serves as a safeguard for a Service Level Agreement (SLA). SLOs represent customer happiness and guide the development team’s velocity.

SLIs, or service level indicators, are powerful metrics of service health. They’re often built up from simpler metrics that are monitored from the system. SLIs transform lower level machine data into something that captures user happiness. Your organization might already have processes with this same goal. Techniques like real-time telemetry and using synthetic data also build metrics that meaningfully represent service health.