Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I used to joke that I got my best parenting ideas from management books, and my best management ideas from parenting books. Now, I'm extending it to agents. Hear me out. When you're teaching a teen how to drive, you don't hand them the car keys on day one. You start in an empty parking lot. You ride along and ask them to talk through what they're doing.

The best alert is the one that never fires. Picture an idyllic Tuesday afternoon: last night's release nudged checkout p99 up 41%, but an agent noticed. Nobody got paged, and your SLOs didn't start burning. Instead, the agent acted and already narrowed it down to one retry change. It filed a ticket for the Payments team and flagged the PR. By the time anyone would have noticed, the fix is in review. That's what SRE was always supposed to feel like.