Optimize User Experiences and Boost Resilience

BizOps for the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

By adopting BizOps approaches, your Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams can establish the metrics, processes, and capabilities that boost service level indicators and business results.

Analyst Report Gartner: DevOps Teams Must Use Site Reliability Engineering to Maximize Customer Value

By employing SRE models, your organization can make significant strides in improving the customer experience and accelerate digital transformation

Harness BizOps to Promote Agility and Resilience

Gain tighter alignment with business objectives. Crystallize your SRE team’s focus on the efforts that matter most to the organization.

Enhance Productivity Create continuous feedback loops between operations, development teams, and business leadership. Ensure all teams are focusing efforts, workflows, and plans on key business objectives.

Attain Service-Level Objectives Leverage intelligent recommendations and automated remediation to create more resilient production environments. Establish observability that’s aligned with business services.

Boost Observability Institute a single source of truth that enables enhanced collaboration. Harness AI-driven intelligence that spans the software development lifecycle.

Blog Posts for SREs

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SRE vs. DevOps: Yes, There is a Difference (And Yes, It Matters)

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Establishing SRE Metrics that Fuel Collaboration and Success

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Reducing Operations Toil with Site Reliability Automation

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What the Experts are Saying

“SRE adoption is most likely to succeed when I&O leaders take three steps. First, they must build reliability into critical products. Then, they must reduce the toil in operating and monitoring those products. Finally, they must iteratively adopt DevOps tools for continuous feedback and improvement.”

Gartner | DevOps Teams Must Use Site Reliability Engineering to Maximize Customer Value

Establishing Metrics that are Key to SRE Success

To be effective, SRE teams must establish benchmarks by which application reliability is defined. Review this blog post to get best practices for establishing effective service-level objectives (SLOs) and service-level indicators (SLIs) that foster ongoing operational and performance improvements.

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The Wrong Tools Can Stifle Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Adoption

Given their legacy of being developed and employed by so-called digital natives like Google or Facebook, SRE models either implicitly or explicitly assume that large teams of technology experts are available to apply engineering approaches to IT operations and application development. However, that’s not the reality for most of the mainstream enterprises that are now seeking to institute SRE models.

As an SRE team seeks to pursue SRE initiatives, the tools in place can offer significant support—or pose a massive detriment. The reality is that many organizations looking to adopt SRE models are either employing loosely connected toolchains or open-source tools developed in house. While some of the largest technology companies have the internal resources to make do-it-yourself or point-tool approaches work; that doesn’t mean it’s the optimal approach for most enterprises. On the contrary, these approaches can represent significant efforts that derail SRE adoption, leaving teams spending too much time, and realizing too little value for their efforts.

Adopting the SRE Model: Key Technology Requirements

To fully capitalize on SRE models, teams need platforms that provide scalable, flexible, and easy-to-use automation that can be aligned with complex, dynamic enterprise IT environments and rapidly evolving business requirements.

Establish Ecosystem Observability that’s Aligned with Business Services

It is vital that the golden signals and SLIs being monitored ultimately track what matters most: the user experience. Having this visibility is essential if SRE teams are to manage their error budgets intelligently. However, in today’s environments, determining how to identify and track the right metrics is more easily said than done.

To effectively adopt SRE models, teams need to establish comprehensive coverage that delivers unified visibility of the entire enterprise ecosystem, whether development teams are running legacy on-premises technologies, modern services and systems, or a mix of both. The software engineer needs visibility that spans from mobile applications to networks and mainframes.

Today, it’s no longer enough to monitor a monolithic computing stack or a discrete infrastructure element; it’s about making complex, modern ecosystems observable.

Harness Unified, AI-driven Intelligence that Spans the Software Development Lifecycle

SRE and DevOps share many fundamental themes. In addition, both SRE and DevOps present a similar challenge: How do previously isolated teams begin to work together seamlessly?

This requires a shift in workflows and cultures, and it demands that tools deliver entirely new features. If a development team simply seeks to connect disparate tools, silos will remain.

Ultimately, for SRE models to succeed, teams must have a holistic view of the stack—the frontend, backend, libraries, storage, kernels, and physical machine. The solution is to expand upon the concept of a data lake, and build a “digital river.”

A digital river enables all teams across the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to gain role-specific views into a unified data model, so they can maximize the utility of data in solving problems, gaining insights, and delivering new features.

Implement Comprehensive, Intelligent Automation

Employing automation to reduce toil is a core tenet of SRE best practices. Through automation, for example, SRE teams can take a software engineering approach to prevent an incident, rather than reacting to an issue after the fact. However, that doesn’t mean teams should work on automation efforts in an ad hoc, one-off fashion.

In many cases, teams have employed limited automation that is based on custom-developed scripts or APIs that are connected to domain-specific tools. These approaches create islands of automation, which presents a couple of challenges:

First, with these approaches, an SRE team can’t pragmatically automate complex workflows that span multiple technology platforms and domains.
Second, these integrations don’t work well in most cases. For example, an alert from a server monitoring tool can trigger server-related remediation, while the actual issue may stem from a network device.

Resources for SREs

White Paper Unlocking the Value of the SRE Model

IT leaders are wrestling with ways to maximize agility, and the SRE model is emerging as a key enabler.

White Paper Forrester: To Drive Great Business Results With Software, Close The CEO-CIO Gap

To deliver quality software quickly, CEOs and IT leaders need to be aligned on goals, metrics, and strategies.

eBook The Definitive Guide to BizOps: Meeting the Digital Transformation Imperative

To capitalize on BizOps, your teams need a new AI-driven approach that augments and even automates decision making.

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