Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Mean time to resolution (MTTR) is a metric that transcends industry and technology. It’s a measure of how quickly, on average, support teams identify, act, and resolve IT issues and incidents. Because MTTR directly relates to service quality, maintaining a low MTTR is a critical goal for DevOps and SRE teams. These teams have a vested interest in resolving issues quickly because escalating incidents to higher levels of the support team increases response and resolution times.

I’ve had the honor and privilege of authoring The SRE Report for the last three years. For the 2023 version, this included working with some amazing individuals like Anna Jones, Kurt Andersen, and Steve McGhee. Download The SRE Report 2023 here (no registration required).

Let's be honest, nobody loves surveys. Ok, well I sure don't. But surveys satisfy a huge need in our demand for insights into complex human-computer, sociotechnical systems. It turns out that we've been measuring the computer part pretty well, but the humans – not as easy to keep track of. When Google SRE first defined toil as a metric we wanted to reduce, we spent far too long trying to quantify it numerically based on tooling and insights from computer systems.

A guide to set practical Service Level Objectives (SLOs) & Service Level Indicators (SLIs) for your Site Reliability Engineering practices.

One of the key attributes of DevOps and SRE engineers is their ability to meticulously observe and monitor all of their applications. A task which can be achieved more efficiently by centralizing all generated logs to a central endpoint. By centralizing logging, engineers can, at any time, have an accurate overview of all events which take place across their applications, from just one place. Storing logs in an external system also allows companies to ensure compliance with many certifications.

It may surprise you to hear, but Honeycomb doesn’t currently have a platform team. We have a platform org, and my title is Director of Platform Engineering. We have engineers doing platform work. And, we even have an SRE team and a core services team. But a platform team? Nope. I’ve been thinking about what it might mean to build a platform team up from scratch—a situation some of you may also be in—and it led me to asking crucial questions. What should such a team own?

You know that old adage about not seeing the forest for the trees? In our Authors’ Cut series, we’ve been looking at the trees that make up the observability forest—among them, CI/CD pipelines, Service Level Objectives, and the Core Analysis Loop. Today, I'd like to step back and take a look at how observability fits into the broader technical and cultural shifts in technology: cloud-native, DevOps, and SRE.

Google has had an outsized impact on the world, from its unrivaled search engine to its expansion into a range of customer-focused services. It would be difficult to make an impact of this magnitude without also leading the way in the software development industry. One of its biggest contributions to the community is a set of principles known as site reliability engineering or SRE.