Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

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.

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.

DevOps gained popularity in order to combat siloed workflows, decreased collaboration and a lack of visibility across the software development lifecycle. While establishing a culture of DevOps has helped teams collaborate better and deliver reliable software faster, DevOps teams don’t necessarily have someone specifically dedicated to developing systems that increase site reliability and performance. That’s where a site reliability engineer (SRE) comes into the picture.

Toil. Few other words have the same visceral impact for SREs as their four-letter nemesis: toil. Although pretty much everyone recognizes and agrees that toil is bad, it is a term that is frequently misused in colloquial use. In common English usage, toil is defined as “long strenuous fatiguing labor”. As a term of art in the SRE profession, “toil” has several very specific characteristics which distinguish it from other sorts of work which people spend time on.