SRE — Keeping the Lights On
Read the full guide on docs.beyondyou.my.idBuilding a service is day one. Keeping it running reliably for years is day two — and that’s where the real engineering challenge lies. SRE’s approach to operations transforms reactive firefighting into proactive reliability engineering through structured monitoring, alerting, incident management, and capacity planning.
Key Takeaways
- Monitoring: Know what’s happening — metrics (RED/USE method), logs, traces, and synthetic checks
- Alerting: Alert on symptoms (user-impacting), not causes (transient errors) — use SLO-based alerting
- Incident Management: Clear roles (Incident Commander, Communications Lead, Operations Lead), structured response, and postmortem follow-through
- Capacity Planning: Forecast demand, provision ahead of need, and stress-test regularly with load testing and chaos engineering
- Runbooks: Automate responses for known failures — the goal is to never manually respond to the same alert twice
Quick Overview
Effective monitoring starts with the right metrics. The RED method (Rate, Errors, Duration) covers service-level monitoring — how many requests, how many failed, how long they took. The USE method (Utilization, Saturation, Errors) covers resource-level monitoring — CPU, memory, disk, network. Together they provide a complete picture of system health.
Alerting should be actionable and signal-based. Every alert that fires should require a human response — if an alert just auto-resolves without action, it shouldn’t exist. SLO-based alerting is the gold standard: alert when your error budget is burning too fast, not on every transient spike.
Read the full guide: SRE — Keeping the Lights On → — includes alert design patterns, incident management frameworks, and capacity planning models.