SRE – DevopsCurry

Monitoring vs Observability: What’s the difference?

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 02:23:02 +0000

In this article, we are discussing how so similar-sounding terms like monitoring and observability differ of Monitoring vs Observability

How is monitoring different from observability?

Bugs and errors are inevitable even with the most experienced developers and tools on the team. Finding and resolving these bugs is a major part of the development process. But the problem comes when customers find these bugs first. Because then they might give a bad ‘public’ review or worse, switch to a competitor never to return again.

However, this unfortunate situation can be avoided if the developers find these bugs first and fix them before the customers face them. But how?

Here comes monitoring and observability tools that help developers detect and fix errors and anomalies across the system. They may sound similar, but monitoring and observability are quite different based on their functionality and scope of work.

Let’s first understand what is monitoring…

What is monitoring?

Monitoring refers to continuously collecting and analyzing data on performance, availability, and system health in general. It measures specific metrics like CPU usage, uptime/downtime, response time, error rates, etc.

SRE(Site Reliability Engineering) developed by Google is the practice of combining software engineering and operations to automate tasks and ensure system reliability. Dynatrace describes it as “As a discipline, SRE focuses on improving software system reliability across key categories including availability, performance, latency, efficiency, capacity, and incident response.” SRE practices involve monitoring of some the most important metrics known as the 4 golden signals. They are described as follows:

Latency: It is the time taken by a system to respond to a request. For example, the time it takes for a website to load when the user clicks on its link. If the latency is more i.e. the website takes more time to load, it annoys the user who might abandon it. Thus, the lower the latency, the better the user experience.
Traffic: Traffic measures the amount of load a service or system is handling at a time. A higher traffic indicates higher user demand for the service.
Error: The error rate is the rate of unsuccessful or failed requests. It is important to track both the overall error rate and the service-specific error rate. Categorizing errors into critical and non-critical also helps the development team deal with the most disruptive errors first.
Saturation: Saturation tells you about the overall capacity of a service or how close a service is to reaching its limits. It is measured in terms of how much CPU, memory, or network bandwidth the service is utilizing.

Application performance monitoring or APM is another term related to monitoring that focuses on tracking the performance of applications in particular. Some popular monitoring tools include Nagios, Zabbix and Prometheus.

What is observability?

Strongdm defines observability, also known as O11Y, as “the ability to assess an internal system’s state based on the data it produces.”

Unlike monitoring, which barely collects data as fixed metrics, observability involves analyzing current and historical data and helps to diagnose the root cause of errors in the system. That said, although observability has a wider scope than monitoring, it cannot function without it.

The 3 pillars of observability through which it determines system health are – logs, metrics, and traces…

Metrics: Metrics are quantitative (or numerical) measures of data that indicate the system’s health and performance. It is the place where observability overlaps with monitoring. Error rate, CPU utilization, and network throughput are a few examples of metrics.
Logs: SolarWinds defines logs as “…detailed records of events from every piece of software, user action, and network activity.” They include time-stamped and chronological data on all the processes that occur within a service. That said, while metrics raise alerts during a problem, logs tell about what events happened and are happening around the problem. This helps the developers find the cause of the problem.
Traces: Traces record the flow of a request from one end to the other. They help developers see the flow of requests and identify errors in their path.

Observability tools help to gather and analyze data like metrics, logs, and traces to diagnose issues in the system. AppDynamics, Datadog and Dynatrace are a few of the leading observability tools in the market.

Monitoring vs observability

Here’s a table for a quick summary of the difference between monitoring and observability…

Conclusion

Monitoring and observability perform similar functions but differ in terms of the depth of work. Monitoring provides surface-level insights like what the problem is while observability provides deeper insights into what caused the problem and how it is affecting the system. Moreover, observability tools can include monitoring features but it is not so the other way around. Hence, monitoring can be said as a part of a larger and advanced field which is observability.

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SRE Role In 2024

Shiwani Sharma — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 04:18:26 +0000

What is an SRE? (Site Reliability Engineering)

They always want to work in two ways either to automate operations tasks. It helps the team for its movability means if a team wants to move from a traditional approach to IT operations to a cloud-native method, then the SRE supports their team for that. For enhancing the integrity of software and the infrastructure which operates it and SRE furnishes incentive and expensive input.

What do SRE do? (Roles and Responsibilities)

In simple terms, a site reliability engineering work is to shared goal, overlapping skillset, consistent tools and have common basis and development team and SRE team has a very slightly bridge. The term Reliability in SRE means, it has a specific part in the organizations and the lifecycle of Software Development. 3S are very important in

Roles and Responsibilities of Site Reliability Engineering

The site reliability engineer gets the benefit from both the teams the software development and the IT operations. While working with these two teams takes less time and focuses on more time for generating new components and services.

Image Credit: https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/devops/articles/site-reliability-engineer/#lg=1&slide=0

In the above image you can see some point that are the benefits of Site Reliability Engineer and some of these we have mentioned below as well.

Its role is to support the team

SRE develops the software to support the team and operation. Site reliability engineers create a tool that helps and solve any problem in the delivery of software.

Performing analyses that is post-incident

The SRE team needs to maintain each and every one between two important teams ( software developers and IT professionals) performing post-incident analyses and have to put up with the effort on their knowledge and it also boosts the dependability of their service.

Their responsibility is to rectify their problems

SRE spends time fixing support escalation cases. If you want to see fewer problems in production then it must take more attention to SRE operation because somewhere in a whole organization Site reliability engineer team consist of several parts of IT and engineering.

Documentations & Knowledge Sharing

One of the important role of SRE is to make and maintain documentations, best practices and it’s also essential to share the knowledge across the entire team to get the culture of learning and by this way you will see the improvement in work and enhancing the knowledge in the entire team.

The main role and responsibility of SRE is to focus on the actual requirement of the customer and when the customer wants to use the services and the platform, they can use them easily.

Benefit of Site reliability engineer

Image Credit: https://www.impelsys.com/blog/why-site-reliability-engineering-is-critical-for-any-organization/

Some of the useful and important benefit of site reliability engineer (SRE) are as follow:

It takes additional time for developing values

If the organization has a system that can easily find the error and solve it and this is beneficial for the development staff because they don’t have to invest their time on the issue, they focus on the new characteristics and improvements. SRE utilizes the knowledge of IT staff from productivity and creating value by having less distraction. SRE encourages the staff to provide the values of their good work in terms of both quantity and quality.

It satisfies the customer expectations

SRE targets are on the satisfaction of the client or customer. 4 elements are important for SRE that satisfies the customer is SLA (Service Level Agreement) SLO (Service Level Objective) SLI (Service Level Indicator) SRE provides more services, many functional products and the services are provided on time, that’s why the client is more satisfied with the work.

Reducing the bugs and the issues

The SRE team has to focus on solving the issues that are arising rather than formulating a code because solving the problem will satisfy the customer and it is more important to create a code.

Cost Efficiency

By maximize the presentation and decreasing the downtime, the Site Reliability engineer practices in the final analysis to make a donation to save the cost for the organization.

Regularly Improvement

It’s essential to do the continuous monitoring for the site reliability engineers, they inspire to do more and new learning and uplift you from the failures, leading to ongoing improvements and prevents you from the problems that may happens again.

Future for SRE Role

As we know SRE is going famous daily, so every site reliability engineer who has good knowledge and much qualified have reasonable salaries it approaches how to use the business. If any aspirant wants to make future on SRE then they have to take full knowledge about it and so the attention on future development and related alternative. Now-a-days in the technical industries SRE engineering jobs role is in trending or in a high demand. In USA this role is the second most promising and important job. As per the report send in LinkedIn, the salary criteria for this role is:

The starting salary or basis salary is $200,000, Rate of Job Opening : 1500 and more than 75%

Conclusion: SRE is known as Site reliability engineering. The team of SRE works as a tool that uses the software for unravelling any difficulties and managing the system. Through coding, it supports regulating huge systems that control a bundle of machines or you can say more than thousands of machines. It also represents a transformative approach that transcends traditional boundaries between development and operations. SRE empowers organizations to build and maintain highly scalable, payable and efficient system.

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Platform Engineer VS DevOps Vs SRE : Understanding the difference

Shiwani Sharma — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 17:12:19 +0000

Over the last few years the terms and roles of Platform engineer, DevOps & SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) have gained a lot of popularity. All three are related to the same field Software Development and Operations field but they all have different ror even overlapping responsibilities.

Image Credit:https://www.getambassador.io/blog/rise-of-cloud-native-engineering-organizations

As you can see in the image above, you can observe how teams are organized into Platform engineers and SRE, as well as how the teams measure the success of both. This will give you an idea of their differentiation. They collaborate with various teams, including multiple development teams. Now, in the following article, you will learn about SRE, DevOps, and Platform Engineers separately.

What is Platform Engineer?

As we already discussed about platform engineering in our separate blog article (An Overview Of Platform Engineering) you will get the more insights about Platform engineering.

A platform engineer’s responsibilities are to organize, create, and maintain the infrastructure that endorses the DevOps of software applications. Now-a-days platform engineer is becoming in trend because it guaranteed to provide the best experience to developer and speed up the product team. They also helps the work of developer more efficiently just by doing CI/CD pipelines, configuring IaC( Infrastructure as Code) to automate the cloud resources.

Platform engineering is a new discipline that has emerged in response to the growing complexity of our modern day Cloud-native architectures. It can be called as a practice of building and maintaining an integrated product, which we call as “Internal Developer Platform” (IDP) ,which acts as a flexible and supported abstraction layer between developers and the underlying technologies of their applications.

Platform engineering is a process or an art that combines several tools and technologies which streamlines the software development and delivery process and help decrease the mental load on individual contributors, enabling self-service platforms for developers and other stakeholders.

What is DevOps Engineer?

A Process that integrates IT operations, practice, tools, software development And contributes the outstanding characteristics of software with the endless delivery.

It characterises the take on the renewal of programmable infrastructure and expenditure, software development, industrialisation. In a company, it stimulates alliance and transmission.

DevOps have some procedures such as the CI/CD tool (Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery) with an intensity of task automation. Microservices, Container, and executing together with the DevOps methodologies. Though it is clear that it has some methodologies, it is not a technology.

Image Credit: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/devops-tutorial/

As you can see in the above image , you can get some idea exactly about what is DevOps ? The two words define DevOps (Dev + Ops ) (software development and Operations) and in other words, you can say the assortment of software development and operation is known as DevOps.

It enhances the speed and quality of the application that has been delivering to an enormous extent and that’s why it’s becoming more prominent for the organization.

It provides you with the faster speed, security for your code, delivered quickly, these are some of the important features of using DevOps.

What is an SRE? (Site Reliability Engineering)

SRE is known as Site reliability engineering. The team of SRE works as a tool that uses the software for unravelling any difficulties and managing the system. Through coding, it supports regulating huge systems that control a bundle of machines or you can say more than thousands of machines. It has many more similarities to DevOps. Site reliability engineering was inaugurated by Ben TreynorSloss and the idea of SRE came from Google Engineering. The engineer who is working on Google has written SRE. There are two terms and components which are very valuable for SRE are automation and standardization. They always want to work in two ways either to automate operations tasks. It helps the team for its movability means if a team wants to move from a traditional approach to IT operations to a cloud-native method, then the SRE supports their team for that. For enhancing the integrity of software and the infrastructure which operates it and SRE furnishes incentive and expensive input.

Image Credit: https://www.devopsschool.com/blog/𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗢𝗽𝘀-𝗩𝘀-𝗦𝗥𝗘-𝗩𝘀-𝗣𝗹𝗮/

This above image help you to know more about these three and get a better differentiation between DevOps, SRE & Platform Engineering.

Main differences Between Platform Engineer, DevOps & SRE

KEY DIFFERENCES

PLATFORM ENGINEER

DEVOPS

SRE

Automation

Platform engineer forces automation in CI/CD

DevOps encourages automation. It also uses automation in testing, monitoring, CI/CD.

Same as DevOps, SRE also encourages automation.

Communication& Collaboration

It facilitates the communication and it also collaborate between operation and development team.

As a core principle Devops also facilitates the communication and collaborate between operation and development team.

Same as platform engineer and DevOps SRE collaborate with operation and development team and also it deliver high-quality software.

Responsibility

A platform engineer’s responsibilities are to organize, create, and maintain the infrastructure that endorses the DevOps of software applications

DevOps are responsible for solving the trouble and production monitoring.

Same as DevOps but also uses the monitoring tools Grafana,Splunk.

Conclusion:

So at the end we see that these three, DevOps, SRE & Platform Engineering are very important approaches in the today’s software development world and each of these has its own unique function and their responsibility. A platform engineer’s responsibilities are to organize, create, and maintain the infrastructure that endorses the DevOps of software applications. DevOps is a Process that integrates IT operations, practice, tools, software development And contributes the outstanding characteristics of software with the endless delivery. The team of SRE engineers works as a unit that uses the software tools for mointiring and unravelling any difficulties in managing the system.

We can say that the current fast-paced software development environments demand close collaboration among SRE, DevOps and Platform Engineering to meet various requirements for a seamless Development, Deployment, and improved production systems.

We can finally conclude that: Even though these roles are distinct, but their responsibilities may overlap, based on the needs and requirements of the organizations.

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DevOps vs SRE: looking at the variance between the two in 2021

Namrata Joshi — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 16:40:37 +0000

DevOps vs SRE- understanding the thin line in 2021

DevOps and SRE (Software Reliability Engineering) are two sides of the same coin. Google first introduced DevOps and then approached the new methodology called SRE. Both may sound similar but they’re not, trust me. In this article, let us explain the difference between DevOps and SRE in the simplest way possible.

People often get confused between these two terms and their functionalities. First of all, we have to have a clear definition of What is DevOps? And What is SRE?

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a culture or a mindset which combines Developers and Operations together. Traditionally, the developers worked to develop the code and throw it to the operations team. The operations team was responsible to keep that code running. There used to be a struggle between these 2 teams more often. Because the developers don’t know about the operational tasks and the operation team had no knowledge of the coding part. Many companies were facing this conflict and many times it was hard to have a balance. DevOps came in light to solve this problem. DevOps was implemented to remove the barrier between developers and operators of any company.

Skills required for a DevOps Engineer

* Flexibility to work in an ever-changing coding process.
* Knowledge and expertise with various Ops and automation tools.
* High-quality skills in scripting code.
* Comfortable to handle frequent testing and incremental releases.
* Ability to understand cloud and infrastructure.
* Soft skills for better collaboration with the team.

In case you are trying to get into a Devops profile or role you can also refer to our below posts:
Roles and Responsibilities of a DevOps Professional
Essential Soft Skills needed to become a Devops Pro in 2021

What is SRE?

SRE or Site Reliability Engineering blends software engineering and operations together. The work of SREs can be divided in 2 major parts: Development tasks and Operations tasks. The SRE is responsible for information sharing between Dev and Ops departments. SRE makes the whole process of DevOps smooth and easy-going.

As per Liz Fong-Jones (SRE at Google), SRE is a concrete class which implements DevOps:

Class SRE implements DevOps

So, SRE is a part of DevOps. There should not be a discussion about which is better? DevOps or SRE? Both are quite different and work together to make things better in any organization. Thus, it is not really ‘SRE vs DevOps’, it is more like ‘SRE in DevOps’.

Skills required for an SRE Engineer

* Have a software-centric mindset.
* Ability to postmortem unexpected accidents to solve future risks.
* Comfortable to handle operations, monitoring, and alerting.
* Relish change and frequent releases.
* Ability to convince organizations to do what actually needs to be done.

If you are planning to adopt and shape into an SRE role, refer to the following posts:
DevOps 2021: Paving your way into SRE
DevOps 2021: A Complete Guide To Transition From a SysAdmin to DevOps Role

Image Credits: https://revolgy.com/blog/devops-vs-sre/

The Difference between DevOps and SRE

So the main objective of DevOps is to combine Developers and Operations together. According to Google: DevOps is all about ‘What’ needs to be done and SRE is all about ‘How’ things can be done. SRE concludes that everyone is responsible for everything.

A DevOps engineer not only has complete knowledge of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle), but he has the ability to execute constant changes any infrastructure might have. So, such skills will be developed with years of experience and knowledge. But an SRE’s job is to make sure that the site is always working in any circumstances.

Let us clarify the difference between DevOps and SRE with the Google approach, as it is easier to understand for everyone.

As per Google, there are 5 pillars where SRE complies with DevOps:

1. Reduce organization silos
Silos means isolation of one department from another. Usually, large organizations have various departments. Each department works separately. More often they don’t communicate with each other. This leads the team to unable to see the larger goal they are serving together. Besides that, this might lead to miscommunications and disappointments.

DevOps will work on reducing the silos. It will make sure that everyone is working to fulfill a common goal. There are not teams that are not serving the actual purpose of the organization. SRE will share the ownership. It will use the same tool and techniques across each and every team. SRE will not focus on silos. But it will try to share the ownership across the organization.

2. Accept failure as Normal
Failure can’t be avoided. Computers do make mistakes. And when humans are involved, the chances of mistakes are even higher. Even though the goal wit DevOps is to handle errors, we cannot get rid of these errors completely. In DevOps culture, it is normal to make mistakes. Errors are acceptable and work as a chance to learn from it.

SRE does SLOs and Blameless PMOs to make sure there are not any errors. Even if we might learn from those errors. SRE uses formulas to check errors. The formula is measured with SLIs (Service Level Indicators) and SLOs (Service Level Objective).

3. Implement gradual change
Most of the companies encourage changes in the system. The goal here is constant improvements. There will be new releases, new updates every now and then.
DevOps handles such changes in a gradual way. SRE wants such changes small and regular ones. DevOps and SRE both are encourage changes. SREs wil manage these changes with keeping the cost of the failure in center. The cost of the failure should be reduced along with the changes.In the end, there should be an improvement in product quality with gradual changes.

4. Leverage Tooling and Automation – Automate this year’s job away
DevOps and SRE work to improve automation. Both try to add as much automation as possible. DevOps promotes automation and tools adoption. SRE will focus that everyone has access to the updated tools of automation and technologies.
SRE does not use a specific set of tools and technologies to complete a particular task. But it works to automate the year’s job away. Thus it is focused on the API. SRE wants the team to use the same tools and services to avoid any silos in DevOps. This will avoid incompatibility and mismanagement.

5. Measure everything – Measure toil and reliability
DevOps and SRE support automation. And an automated system needs continuous measurement to ensure everything is going smoothly.

DevOps focus on the process performance and results via a feedback loop. SREs will measure SLOs. SRE accepts Operations as a software problem. So it will measure the toil and reliability of Ops. SRE will assure that everyone in the organization agrees to the reliability measurement standards.

Conclusion

So, is there a difference between DevOps and SREs? DevOps, as it seems, is more of a “free spirit”, with the definition and implementation approach varying from organization to organization.

However, DevOps and SRE teams are not so different. DevOps and SRE Don’t Compete With Each Other.Both Devops & SRE help combine developer and operation teams, while sharing similar responsibilities and focusing on enabling automation and reliability.

So we should wisely use the power of SRE and blend with our Devops roadmap to build reliable software and maintain availability & observability.

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DevOps 2021: Paving your way into SRE

Namrata Joshi — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 08:53:17 +0000

To be or Not to be: Exploring SRE as a Career in 2021

Ever considered becoming an SRE, if you’re looking forward to playing a challenging yet in-demand role in the DevOps space. SRE or Site Reliability Engineering was a term coined first at Google in 2003 by Benjamin Treynor Sloss, VP of engineering at Google, way before the DevOps. Site Reliability Engineering creates a bridge between development & operations by applying a software engineering mindset to system administration topics.

Eventually, SRE has became a full-fledged IT profile, which aims at building automated solutions for operations team such as on-call monitoring, performance and capacity planning, and backup and disaster recovery plan. However at its core, SRE is an implementation of the DevOps paradigm.

So in this post we have tried outlining What is SRE, its key benefits, and also what is the current demand and potential future for the SRE role.

SRE and DevOps

If we consider the traditional definition of DevOps – it is an environment where the development (devs) and operation (ops) work altogether intending to be able to release software faster at great stability.

Whereas SRE aims at developing automated solutions for operational performance, capacity planning & disaster response. Hence, SRE complements other core DevOps practices like continuous delivery & infrastructure automation.

“Site reliability engineers create a bridge between development and operations by applying a software engineering mindset to system administration topics.”

Picture Courtsey: Alice Goldfuss from https://blog.alicegoldfuss.com/how-to-get-into-sre/

SRE as a career- What does a Site Reliability Engineer do?

A Site Reliability Engineer works with operation along with developing systems & software that help to increase site reliability & performance.

So, the ultimate goal of SRE is to automate their way out of a job, as per Google. Google gives a lot of emphasis on SREs to not spend more than 50% of their time on operations & consider any violation of this rule as a sign of system ill-health. As long as you have a strong foundation in software or system engineering, you can consider becoming an SRE.

It is also essential to have a strong incentive for improving & automation. System engineers who want to improve their programming skills & software engineers who want to learn how to manage large-scale systems are perfect candidates for the role of an SRE. This role will allow you to gain a system-wide view.

The role of the SRE can be fun & exciting when the application architecture & technology decisions allow for scalable stateless solutions. Moreover, you can be updated with the latest trends in the DevOps world. It’s a great way to expand your knowledge & skills in high-demand areas like continuous delivery, infrastructure automation & release engineering. This role is extremely creative, stimulating & technically challenging.

How has the SRE role evolved in the last few years?

Twenty years ago, we did not have multiple regions, each containing hundreds of thousands of physical as well as virtual machines. There were no thousands of microservices creating complex software. No service dependency chains were working on a reliable network & hardware working with third-party providers, APIs & vendors.

Now, we need a way to manage these complexities at a faster pace. Google was the first company to really start operating at an internal scale. They created the concept of a new type of engineering to help manage this complexity & ensure reliability. This engineer is called an SRE. But SREs certainly have existed for decades in many different forms. For example, disaster recovery and production testers.

The demand for SREs grew as companies went on to try cloud-native. SREs were required to work in production & operations, with a focus on automation & observability. As the systems became distributed, this role has evolved with time. The role of an SRE evolved from just shoring up uptime to a relationship broker who has viewed into the organization, wide systems & problem-solving. As the demand grows, SREs become those people who can work across the company.

An SRE is someone good at communication as well as prioritization. Site Reliability Engineering is an offshoot of the DevOps culture. SRE is focused on the external value the company can reliably offer customers. While DevOps is more about internally increasing velocity. In conclusion, SRE has been around since forever, but certainly, it’s growing and in-demand. Any size organization can benefit from a good SRE and service level objectives.

The current demand for SRE

An SRE is expected to juggle between networking, security, system administration, hardware & anything else that could possibly make your infrastructure unstable. Hence a SRE can also be called DevOps specialist.

A SRE should know about both software development & system infrastructure. They are in charge of making sure that the website & applications are loading, which is highly critical.

That is why SREs are among the highest-paid in the industry. They also rank among the ones with the most coding experience and it takes hard work & time to get there. SREs job satisfaction is among the highest in the industry, as they have an interesting job with high pay.

SREs rank in the top three of the ones NOT actively looking for a job. SRE professionals are among the most wanted in the tech industry. 33% of IT leaders are having a hard time hiring a good SRE. SREs are 30 times more likely to be men than women. But there are more women than men in this field.

SREs are typically found at high-performing tech companies that have large data centers & complex technical challenges. Their roles can be inspiring from both a financial & workplace culture perspective. SREs are ruling the tech world & more of them are highly in demand.

Future Growth of SRE

Site Reliability Engineers have a great & promising future. SRE is one of the most buzzed skills in the IT industry. With automation & observability becoming a key feature for more efficient & rapid deployment, an SRE job profile will be one of the most demanding in the coming years.

The post-pandemic environment has resulted in a major shift in where SREs will be located. 50% of SREs will be working remotely post covid-19, as compared to only 19% before the pandemic. Moreover, the SRE concept has been embraced by major internet companies like DropBox, Netflix & Airbnb.

The SRE community now even has its conference called SREcon. While we await the milestone, it’s not too soon to consider the implications of the SRE discipline in each & every organization.

Benefits of SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)  

1. Fills the gap between developers and operations
SRE encourages DevOps culture. Hence, SRE fits perfectly in the gap between developers & sysadmins. The entire engineering team is equally responsible for facilitating a reliable and quick CI/CD pipeline.

SRE can draw attention to the areas for improvement in the release pipeline. Meantime, it also creates rules around the culture of on-call availability & incident response that encourages everyone to be more accountable.

2. Focus on Error-budget and SLOs
The main focus of the SRE approach is the SLO for the application or service that is being run by the SRE team. The product manager has to choose an appropriate SLO that gives enough margin of possible downtime to cover unforeseen problems. The SLO approach also drives the adoption of synthetic transaction monitoring, which is great practice for customer-facing systems.

If the product manager working with an SRE team is unhappy with the restrictions. On deploying new features, he/she can either redefine the SLO or put more effort into operational aspects of the software.

3 Remove Bugs before they hurt end-users
Bugs and issues can often go unnoticed when the complete focus is on development speed. If the operation team does not notice them, it may cause significant delays and downtime. Eventually, this will leave the end-users unsatisfied.

SRE works proactively to notice and solve the errors as soon as possible.their performance metrics, combined with their high-level perspective, enable them to find & fix issues during production with a great degree of accuracy. This is a quite effective approach than traditional operations. SRE will also ensure that there are practices for tasks like incident responses, cross-departmental collaboration, and many more to make sure other teams can support them effectively.

4 Improved Metrics reporting
One of the most prominent benefits of SRE is clarity. SRE utilizes pertinent metrics of bugs, productivity, efficiency, etc. they can also translate these measurements in terms of their impact on more tangible elements.

SRE highlights areas of improvement at multiple stages of a development & operations pipeline with a high level of clarity it offers. SRE expert will also observe the relationship between different teams, departments & services for the sake of increasing communication & collaboration.

5 Creates Observability into service health
SRE teams spend their time dabbling in a multitude of different areas of an organization’s systems. SRE experts have the greatest understanding of how everything in the system is connected.

Hence, they know the best way to track logs and traces across disparate services & depict a holistic approach to system health. If any incident happens, the observability is already there so on-call responders can find the context they need.

Conclusion

So you too can make a career shift into an SRE role, regardless of your background in software engineering, as long as you have solid foundations in it and a strong passion for improving and automating the systems around you.

If you are a Systems engineer and want to work on your programming skills, or if you are a Software guy and want to learn about working with large-scale systems, this SRE profile is apt for you. Deepening your knowledge in both areas will give you a competitive edge and more flexibility for the future.

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