Software metrics give important insight into the performance of your product, but which ones matter most to SRE teams? How do you decide which metrics to track?

Nowadays, organizations address a high volume of incidents everyday. With so much happening, responders can be overwhelmed by the volume of incidents and may end up de-prioritizing certain important incidents. Hence, it is important to have an efficient on-call scheduling and escalation process in place. In this blog, we will explore how Round Robin Escalations can help distribute on-call load and set up efficient on-call schedules. This blog covers the following pointers.

Reliability engineering focuses on the ability of systems to perform as it is intended to and function without failure in a specified environment, for the required time duration. Reliability engineering can be applied across the entire lifecycle of software development. It is designed to increase the dependability of a product by detecting potential reliability issues early in the software development cycle, and correcting causes of failure that do occur.

A code freeze means no code can be altered or modified during the frozen time, and developers will not make any additional changes. Developers can only modify the code in the event of critical flaws and to the extent required to correct those vital problems. Primarily developers observe a code freeze during the final phase of software development when the software product has reached the delivery state.

Logs are key to monitoring the performance of your applications. Kubernetes offers a command line tool for interacting with the control plane of a Kubernetes cluster called Kubectl. This tool allows debugging, monitoring, and, most importantly, logging capabilities. There are many great tools for SREs. However, Kubernetes supports Site Reliability Engineering principles through its capacity to standardize the definition, architecture, and orchestration of containerized applications.

Organizations scramble to adopt new frameworks and methodologies to make the software more scalable. Plus, they need to do it in a reliable way that doesn’t cause more problems. Enter Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), a set of practices introduced by a Google engineer. But how does it stack up to frameworks like DevOps? DevOps and SRE both enhance the software development and product release cycle.

Healthchecks is a cron job monitoring service which listens to HTTP requests and email messages ("pings") from your cron jobs and scheduled tasks ("checks"). It lets you update your job to send an HTTP request to the ping URL every time the job runs. When your job does not ping Healthchecks.io on time, then you will receive an alert! If you use Healthchecks for your monitoring needs, you can now integrate it with Squadcast to route detailed alerts from Healthchecks to the right users in Squadcast.