A selection of live questions and answers from the audience of our recent webinar on how site reliability engineers can best leverage intelligent observability to monitor SLIs and SLOs, prioritize reliability over functionality, and more.

IT Operations teams are often the bedrock of the digital business, ensuring that processes and services continue humming smoothly as developers continue to evolve and increase customer value. But increasingly complex systems can flood them with alerts that get in the way of operators from doing their best work and paving the way for new, innovative services.

After we’d fixed Aparna’s network issue, James came to see me at my desk. Masks on, socially distanced and all that, but it was nice to have some face-to-face time. James is cool – that dry British humor and not your classic IT Ops dude. He’s been here forever and mentored me when the CIO, Charlie, hired me as the first SRE here a year or so ago. I lucked out really.

What precisely are the requirements of a DevOps practitioner, as opposed to an SRE, legacy developer, or operations manager? And do those specific requirements require a different approach to monitoring?

Amidst the nonstop pace of work to constantly evolve today’s digital business, we can forget to take a moment out to think about how it is that we’re doing that work. A new series of ‘coffee break’ webinars aim to provide that opportunity by pausing to look at the ways humans can best work with observability data. In particular, Coffee Break with Helen Beal looks at improving the work done by different types of software engineers that leverage artificial intelligence.

This is the second in a series of blog posts exploring the role that intelligent observability plays in the day-to-day life of smart teams. In this post, meet our clever ITOps engineer, James, as he reduces noise and distraction using intelligent observability.