In the world of modern businesses, where IT systems play a major role in all types of businesses, the role of the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) has become central to managing the effectiveness and reliability of the entire business. SREs are the bridge between the rapid deployment of software and systems and the stable operation of those systems in a production environment. They ensure that reliability and performance criteria are defined and are met.

The on-call experience is sometimes a dreaded one for software engineers. Those late-night alerts and frantic Slack messages, after all, don’t exactly sound pleasant. But what’s an on-call shift really like? Is that perception of constant fire-fighting and 3 AM wake-up calls actually realistic? Michael Mandrus and Owen Smallwood, both senior software engineers here at Grafana Labs, wanted to set the record straight.

‘Manual deployment is (should be) a sin.’ Well, calling manual deployment a sin may sound strong, but consider this: building the ultimate development pipeline demands a focus on automation. Although the selection of a deployment method depends on the specific needs and requirements of a project or environment, can you really deny the power of automated deployment? There's a better way.

ITOps and DevOps teams face many challenges. Their responsibilities are extensive, from navigating complex IT environments at scale to quickly addressing performance issues and minimizing downtime and outages. Enhancing your organization’s IT service assurance requires you to ensure the reliability, performance, and availability of IT services.

Everyone experiences stress at work—thankfully, it’s a topic folks aren’t shying away from anymore. But for on-call engineers, alert fatigue is a phenomenon closer to home. Unfortunately, like stress, it can be just as insidious and drastically impact those it affects. First discussed in the context of hospital settings, this phrase later entered engineering circles.

Dealing with a flood of incidents, each with varying degrees of urgency, can be a daily struggle for Incident Response teams. Suppose a low-priority alert pings while you're tackling a critical incident. This pulls your focus away from the urgent issue. This constant alert bombardment can: How do engineers ensure that high-severity issues take precedence? Don't they want to avoid being bothered or bombarded with notifications while addressing critical matters? They sure do.

Today, incident management is a core part of organizations both big and small. But what if you don't have a program in place...where do you start? Or what if incident management is already a key part of your org, but you're looking to optimize it—where do you kick things off in that case? Consider another situation: What if you're an established organization with years of incident management experience—what are some things that you can do to take things to the next level?

Incidents are a stressful time for your team: your service isn't working the way you expect and your customers/stakeholders want to know what's going on. The last thing you want to do is let your team improvise everything when it comes to responding to incidents. Google's own SRE book has great overall tips for incident management, part of which involves "develop(ing) and document(ing) your incident management procedures in advance", which this article dives into.