Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a discipline in which automated software systems are built to manage the development operations (DevOps) of a product or service. In other words, SRE automates the functions of an operations team via software systems. The main purpose of SRE is to encourage the deployment and proper maintenance of large-scale systems.

Kubernetes (K8s) is a powerful tool for container orchestration, but it presents unique challenges when it comes to monitoring and incident response. Managing K8s requires 360º visibility into your environment, proactive health monitoring, along with right incident management, and suppression capabilities. In this article, we'll explore the benefits of integrating Squadcast with Komodor, two powerful tools that can help you overcome these challenges.

The current tech winter has a number of glaring stories — cyclical as they may be, there’s one truth that’s been gleaned over more than the rest; the money spent on internal software tools to support tech infrastructure is bloated. And there’s nothing cyclical about this infrastructure spending.

A Recap of SRECon 2023 Americas by guest author Sebastian Vietz.

Slack is one of the most widely used messaging Apps, providing collaboration and chat solutions to businesses. We at Squadcast understand that most of your work happens over Slack. Hence, we have made improvements to our Slack integration capabilities by introducing a bunch of UI and functional improvements. This blog will give you an overview of the latest improvements supported by this integration, which we hope will help in better collaboration and Incident Management.

In today’s turbulent times, companies big and small are being pushed to do more with less. Budgets are getting tighter and companies are being pressured to serve customers who demand 24/7 availability from their applications and services. To meet these demands and remain competitive, enterprises are adopting cloud-first strategies and developing applications with microservice architectures.

Last week, over five hundred SREs gathered in Santa Clara to share the latest research, tips, tricks, best practices, and more for site reliability engineering. They were joined by some of the biggest names in the reliability space. And, yes, Gremlin was there to answer any and all questions about chaos engineering and proactive reliability. After three days of great conversations and insightful talk, let’s take a look at some of the themes we heard weaving through SRECon.

Blameless’s comprehensive incident management platform is built to ease the burden of keeping your services up and running. Whether you are in the middle of an incident or trying to better track your response performance, you need access to your incident data on demand. Blameless’s Reliability Insights unifies your Incident, Resource, Task, and IAM data in a single customizable and queryable analytics tool.

Kubernetes can be tough to troubleshoot and remediate fast, especially when you have many interdependent services. This blog, part 3 of 3 in the “8 SRE Best Practices to Help Developers Troubleshoot Kubernetes” series, describes the Kubernetes observability foundation StackState has built to support SRE best practices and enable rapid remediation of issues.

Everything you need to know about Mean Time Between Incidents (MTBI) and how it can help Site Reliability Engineers.

Site reliability engineers can amplify their reach and influence across teams with Cortex in their toolbox. With the ability to define clear standards and drive progress, Cortex enables everyone at an organization to adopt an SRE mindset. Make sure to visit us at SREcon to learn more about how Cortex can serve as a single source of truth for your SRE team!

Last year, I wrote How We Define SRE Work. This article described how I came up with the charter for the SRE team, which we bootstrapped right around then. It’s been a while. The SRE team is now four engineers and a manager. We are involved in all sorts of things across the organization, across all sorts of spheres. We are embedded in teams and we handle training, vendor management, capacity planning, cluster updates, tooling, and so on.

Maintaining reliable Kubernetes systems is not easy, especially for people who are not Kubernetes experts. This blog, part 2 of 3 in the “8 SRE Best Practices to Help Developers Troubleshoot Kubernetes” series, explains 8 simple best practices SREs can follow to help developers and other SREs build knowledge and effectively troubleshoot issues in applications running on Kubernetes.

We’re excited to announce that Blameless is officially SOC 2 compliant! This is part of our larger efforts to assure all the users of Blameless and visitors to our site that we’re meeting and exceeding all of your privacy and security needs. Learn more by visiting our security page! When choosing a service, it’s important to have trust in the provider – especially for something as important as your incident management.

Auvik is a cloud-based network management software that gives you instant insight into the networks you manage and automates complex and time-consuming network tasks. If you use Auvik for network management, you can integrate it with Squadcast, an end-to-end incident response tool, to route detailed alerts from Auvik to the right users in Squadcast. This blog is a step-by-step guide that will help you set up Squadcast-Auvik Integration.

Legacy systems often present a challenge when you try to integrate them with modern monitoring tools, especially when they generate log files that contain personally identifiable information (PII) and IP addresses. Thankfully, Grafana Cloud, which is built to work with modern observability tools and data sources, makes it easy to monitor your legacy environments too.

Designing SLOs is a key SRE competency which requires careful consideration and a consistent approach to implementation.

Seriously… What are people trying to say by “Your approach to IT Operations needs to mature”? Fair question. Billions of dollars are spent every year on software solutions to help IT organizations operate more efficiently. How could it be that with all that investment, we’re still not netting enough efficiency gains? The truth is, our technology landscape has evolved, our operational models have evolved, we have evolved.

What's the difference between SLAs vs SLOs vs SLIs. Understanding these little nuances are critical for DevOps folks. Here's a simple reckoner on what each of these mean.