Software Metrics Every SRE Team Should Measure
Software metrics give important insight into the performance of your product, but which ones matter most to SRE teams? How do you decide which metrics to track?
Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud
The Place Where Modern Operations & Technology Come Together
August 2022
Round Robin Escalation: An Efficient Way to Distribute On-Call Responsibilities
Nowadays, organizations address a high volume of incidents everyday. With so much happening, responders can be overwhelmed by the volume of incidents and may end up de-prioritizing certain important incidents. Hence, it is important to have an efficient on-call scheduling and escalation process in place. In this blog, we will explore how Round Robin Escalations can help distribute on-call load and set up efficient on-call schedules. This blog covers the following pointers.
What is reliability engineering?
Reliability engineering focuses on the ability of systems to perform as it is intended to and function without failure in a specified environment, for the required time duration. Reliability engineering can be applied across the entire lifecycle of software development. It is designed to increase the dependability of a product by detecting potential reliability issues early in the software development cycle, and correcting causes of failure that do occur.
Are Code Freezes Still Needed?
A code freeze means no code can be altered or modified during the frozen time, and developers will not make any additional changes. Developers can only modify the code in the event of critical flaws and to the extent required to correct those vital problems. Primarily developers observe a code freeze during the final phase of software development when the software product has reached the delivery state.
The SRE's Quick Guide to Kubectl Logs
Logs are key to monitoring the performance of your applications. Kubernetes offers a command line tool for interacting with the control plane of a Kubernetes cluster called Kubectl. This tool allows debugging, monitoring, and, most importantly, logging capabilities. There are many great tools for SREs. However, Kubernetes supports Site Reliability Engineering principles through its capacity to standardize the definition, architecture, and orchestration of containerized applications.
SRE vs. DevOps: Differences and Similarities
Organizations scramble to adopt new frameworks and methodologies to make the software more scalable. Plus, they need to do it in a reliable way that doesn’t cause more problems. Enter Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), a set of practices introduced by a Google engineer. But how does it stack up to frameworks like DevOps? DevOps and SRE both enhance the software development and product release cycle.
Healthchecks + Squadcast Integration: Routing Alerts Made Easy
Healthchecks is a cron job monitoring service which listens to HTTP requests and email messages ("pings") from your cron jobs and scheduled tasks ("checks"). It lets you update your job to send an HTTP request to the ping URL every time the job runs. When your job does not ping Healthchecks.io on time, then you will receive an alert! If you use Healthchecks for your monitoring needs, you can now integrate it with Squadcast to route detailed alerts from Healthchecks to the right users in Squadcast.
Introduction to Service Catalog | Service Ownership | Service Classification Squadcast
To make service management a breeze, we bring to you our improved Service Catalog. The Service Catalog is designed to improve Service Classification and bring more transparency to Service Ownership within your org. This video explains how a consolidated summary of all active services from a single dashboard can help you better track your service health.
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What are Runbooks? And why are they needed?
Imagine being an Ops engineer in a team just struck by tragedy. Alarms start ringing, and incident response is in full force. It may sound like the situation is in control. WRONG! There's panic everywhere. The on-call team is scrambling for the heavenly door to redemption. But, the only thing that doesn't stop - Stakeholder Inquiries. This situation is bad. But it could be worse. Now imagine being a less-experienced Ops engineer in a relatively small on-call team struck by tragedy. If you don't have sufficient guidance, let alone moral support- you're toast.
Using StatusPage at squadcast | SRE Best practices | Squadcast
Let your customers know how your Services are doing, without them having to ask you about it. One of the core principles of SRE is Transparency and Status Pages help you communicate the status of your Services to your customers at all times, as opposed to you getting to know the status of your Services through support tickets logged by your customers.
What are Canary Deployments and Why are they Important?
Every modification to software comes with the potential for production problems. Application failures often have serious consequences which can result in a loss of revenue and a poor customer experience. Additionally, organizations constantly try to improve their services for a better customer experience. How can you minimize the chance of error and update your application with confidence?
Performing Postmortems & Postmortem Templates at Squadcast | SRE Best practices | Squadcast
Postmortems are a way to summarize the resolution for an incident once it is resolved. It is also a way for you to create a knowledge-base of failures and fixes that can be shared across your team to help build a culture of shared learning and learning from failures.
Top SRE Interview Questions You Should Know
Whether you’re building an SRE team or looking for a job as an SRE, understanding the SRE job description is important. How would you define an SRE job?
Site Reliability Engineering, Site Reliability Engineers and SRE Practices: State of Adoption
Site reliability engineering (SRE) is what you get when you treat operations as if it’s a software problem. The mission of an SRE practice is to protect, provide for and progress the software and systems offered and managed by an organization with an ever-watchful eye on their availability, latency, performance and capacity.1.
What is an SRE job description?
Whether you’re building an SRE team or looking for a job as an SRE, understanding the SRE job description is important. How would you define an SRE job?
Blameless Announces Ming Gong as New VP of Product Management
Former Product Leader for Atlassian's Bitbucket Cloud to Lead Blameless' Product Vision and Innovation.
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Site Reliability Engineering: Definition, Principles & How It Differs From DevOps
Site crashes and outages can cost hundreds of thousands in lost revenue and inconvenience users. Site Reliability Engineering helps build highly reliable and scalable systems, particularly important for companies that depend on their software to support their customers performing critical operations. Hiring a Site Reliability Engineer is the best way to ensure a software system stays up and running at all times. Not only will they help manage infrastructure and applications, but they'll also be able to advise on how to scale a business as it grows - keeping downtime and incidents at a minimum!
Uptime + Squadcast Integration: Routing Alerts Made Easy
Uptime is a site monitoring solution used to reach various endpoints & notify users via push notifications when downtime is detected. It collects and stores downtime & response time data & which is then made available as reports to the users. If you use Uptime for your monitoring needs, you can now integrate it with Squadcast to route detailed alerts from Uptime to the right users in Squadcast. The below steps will help you set up Uptime and Squadcast integration.
geeks+gurus: Rise of SRE - Survey Insights
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) continues to rise in adoption. Teams that leverage SRE “good” practices are benefitting, individuals are excited about their jobs and IT and the business are collaborating more efficiently. Sounds interesting? We hope so, as there are a few key insights which you should know. Join us to learn more about the exciting journey of SRE. We have partnered with DevOps Institute (DOI) to conduct their inaugural 2022 Global SRE Pulse Survey, and we are excited to share the pulse on SRE.
Chaos Engineering: What Is It & How Does It Work?
Distributed software systems have many points of failure. Can the process of chaos engineering help identify problems and gauge resiliency?
10 Ways You Can Improve Service Reliability
Software reliability can be defined as the probability of a failure-free operation of a computer system over a specified period, under a set of specific conditions. It is an important factor in determining software quality. Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a software approach to IT operations that helps organizations to improve the reliability of their systems.
Comparing DBA, DBRE, and SRE Roles
As I navigate further into my career, I’m finding the scope of my role has shifted over the years. I thought I’d take some time to help relay the differences I’ve seen between traditional database administrators (DBAs), database reliability engineers (DBREs), and site reliability engineers (SREs). Before I start, I want to get a disclaimer out of the way: some of the comparisons here reflect only what I’ve seen and may not match what you’ve experienced.
Tales from the Toil: Taking the pulse of SRE
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a growing practice essential for enterprises to ensure service delivery, reliability, and access for users. Many companies only choose to invest in SRE when they have a raging operational fire on their hands. As a result, SREs often start out as firefighters, desperately trying to keep the service online for one more day.
How to Become a Site Reliability Engineer: Job Description, Roles & Responsibilities
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is still going strong in the world of software development. As a bridge between developments and operations, it’s a necessary part of any organization that wants to work like a well-oiled machine. Simply put, SRE tries to fix a widespread problem in organizations: siloing. But not much is known about the job requirements of becoming a site reliability engineer.
SRE: From Theory to Practice | What's difficult about tech debt?
In episode 3 of From Theory to Practice, Blameless’s Matt Davis and Kurt Andersen were joined by Liz Fong-Jones of Honeycomb.io and Jean Clermont of Flatiron to discuss two words dreaded by every engineer: technical debt. So what is technical debt? Even if you haven’t heard the term, I’m sure you’ve experienced it: parts of your system that are left unfixed or not quite up to par, but no one seems to have the time to work on.
7 Key SRE Principles For Better Reliability
Since Google coined the term, the role of an SRE has evolved as the industry has shifted toward large-scale distributed microservices. An SRE’s job is to determine how to make systems more reliable and resilient.
Blameless Demo: Streamline ServiceNow Incident Ticketing Workflows
Our Director of Product, Nicolas Phillip, shows you how to create ServiceNow incident tickets from your preferred chat tool or the Blameless interface. Watch his step-by-step tutorial and begin leveraging Blameless to create incident tickets in ServiceNow today.
Anti-patterns in Incident Response that you should unlearn
It is important to invest time and effort in understanding why a system performs the way it does and how we can improve it. Companies continue with practices that yield successful results, but ignoring anti-patterns can be far worse than choosing rigid processes. In this blog we will explore anti-patterns in incident response and why you should unlearn those.
Analytics in Squadcast | Incident Management | On-call | SRE | Squadcast
Analyzing incident data plays a key role to do better SRE. Squadcast's Analytics Dashboard helps you analyze the performance of your Organization/ Team, for a given time period. It also gives you more insight into past outages that affected your systems.