Asking an IT engineer or SRE to define the purpose of observability is kind of like asking someone to explain the purpose of life: There are lots of different opinions out there, and no way of proving any of them right or wrong. You could argue that observability is just a buzzword that refers to what used to be called monitoring.

SREs face special challenges during the holidays. Here’s how to manage them.

An explanation of observability that highlights the role observability data play in supporting the active role of SREs as they reduce toil, improve uptime, and judiciously consume the error budget.

Wondering about CloudOps? We explain what CloudOps is, how it relates to DevOps, and how teams can use CloudOps to best manage cloud-native development.

IT Operations has a wide spectrum of roles and responsibilities. The positions range from level 1 (L1) operators to Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and everything in between. L1 operators, for example, are (often) almost exclusively reactive. They feed off the constant stream of incidents reported by clients and events that are reported by monitoring and alerting systems. This is in contrast to SREs, who work at the other end of the spectrum.

In SRE, we believe that some failure is inevitable. Complex systems receiving updates will eventually experience incidents that you can’t anticipate. What you can do is be ready to mitigate the damage of these incidents as much as possible. One facet of disaster readiness is incident response - setting up procedures to solve the incident and restore service as quickly as possible. Another strategy involves reducing the chances for failure with tactics like reducing single points of failure.

An overview of how SREs can benefit from Infrastructure-as-Code.

If you are optimizing your current DevOps processes, we can help. We’ll explain the 7 key principles of DevOps and how to put them into practice.

In the world of a site reliability engineer (SRE), failure is not only an option, but also expected. Systems, web applications, servers, devices, etc., are all prone to performance issues and unexpected outages at some point. It is an unavoidable fact. These unexpected failures can lead to huge revenue losses, customer trust and depending on the industry, maybe fines. Fortunately, SRE incident management is one of the core practices used to limit the disruption caused by unexpected issues.

Although every company can benefit from SREs, some need SREs more than others.