Learn what observability is and why it matters to Site Reliability Engineers.

Agile methodologies are transforming and speeding up the development lifecycle of businesses, but operations are not being changed or speeded up in the same way. While the operations teams frequently struggle to keep up with this pace, it increases operational challenges in the application landscape. To make the whole IT operation more ‘agile’, it is critical to alter operations to par with how development processes are transformed.

At SLOConf 2021 I talked about how we may use error budgets to add pass/fail criterias to reliability tests we run as part of our CI pipelines. As Site Reliability Engineers, one of our primary goals is to reduce manual labor, or toil, to a minimum while at the same time keeping the systems we manage as reliable and available as possible. To be able to do this in a safe way, it's really important that we're able to easily inspect the state of the system.

Imagine that you’re at your company’s all-hands meeting and one of the sellers is proudly ringing the office gong to celebrate closing a big deal with a client who’s on the other side of the world. It’s a big deal because it’s a major project. Their logo is going to look sleek on your website, and you are finally breaking into a new region of the world. But two months after the project kicks off, the situation isn’t looking as rosy.