Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are a key component of any successful Site Reliability Engineering initiative. The question is, what are SLOs; and how do you determine what your SLOs should be? Once you've done that, how should you use them?

A big part of ensuring the availability of your applications is establishing and monitoring service-level metrics—something that our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team does every day here at Google Cloud. The end goal of our SRE principles is to improve services and in turn the user experience. The concept of SRE starts with the idea that metrics should be closely tied to business objectives. In addition to business-level SLAs, we also use SLOs and SLIs in SRE planning and practice.

Let's all face it, on call work isn't fun. But it can be better. Even if you have to work on call, it would be nice to have at least some of the work done for you, before you drag yourself out of bed at 3am to respond to an incident.

SRE best practices are disrupting and catalyzing change in the ways organizations approach IT Operations. In this blog we look at 7 ways SRE is bringing this transition. ‍Site Reliability Engineering is a new practice that has been growing in popularity among many businesses. Also known as SRE, the new activity puts a premium on monitoring, tracking bugs, and creating systems and automations that solve the problem in the long term.

Kubernetes makes it easier in certain ways to manage reliability. But incident response teams and SREs must also be prepared to handle the unique reliability challenges that K8s creates.

How can creating chaos achieve better reliability? Chaos and reliability might seem mutually exclusive, but through the use of Chaos Engineering, SREs can bring about meaningful changes to system resiliency.

Keeping digital services reliable is more important than ever. When something goes wrong in production, on-call teams face significant pressure to identify and resolve the incident quickly – in order to keep customers happy. But it can be difficult to get the right signals to the right person in a timely fashion.

SREs may have better long-term job prospects, but DevOps might be an easier career to pursue.

Site Reliability Engineers are expected to know everything that’s happening, all of the time. That’s a lot of things! To help you sift through the noise, we’ve developed a feature that lets you find accurate data about your organization on-demand. You can do this by sending custom-designed commands to FireHydrant directly from your integrated Slack account.