Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

SRE (site reliability engineering) is a discipline used by software engineering and IT teams to proactively build and maintain more reliable services. SRE is a functional way to apply software development solutions to IT operations problems. From IT monitoring to software delivery to incident response – site reliability engineers are focused on building and monitoring anything in production that improves service resiliency without harming development speed.

Read a blow-by-blow analysis of two of the heavyweights in world of DevOps: when should you bet on Terraform, and what calls for Kubernetes?

To supervise the behavior of distributed applications and track the origin of service failures and downtime, developers often use traditional monitoring technologies and tools. However, this approach can fall short in its ability to measure the overall health of modern cloud-native architectures, which can span multiple hosting environments and encompass hundreds of microservices.

Microservices architecture allows technology companies to build application services around business capabilities. It enables rapid development and also boosts developer productivity. But it also introduces complexity. Troubleshooting and operating an internet-scale application based on microservices is hard. And that’s where distributed tracing comes into the picture. Traditional monolithic application architecture is easy to develop, deploy and monitor.

At ServiceNow, we’ve adjusted to the changing times, encouraging our employees to work in the most efficient and safe ways available to them to embrace the new world of work. We’ve embraced the distributed work model. Three of our global employees are proving it’s possible to adapt to new working environments and thrive—no matter where they are. Their jobs have impacted their personal decisions to work remotely full time, in the office full time, or a hybrid of both.