Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Most sysadmins and developers have at some point used a few of the popular Linux networking commands or their Windows equivalents to answer the common questions of host reachability- that is, whether a host or service is reachable and how fast it responds. One of the simplest, common checks, is to simply ping a host to verify that it’s reachable from where you issue the command, and to see the total time it takes for the host to receive your request.

From entertainment to security, automation is now pervasive. Intelligent devices are transforming our homes while enriching our lives, making them more efficient, productive and environmentally friendly. Most embedded devices run Linux, and their number is poised to keep growing.

Like most tech companies, we use an on-call rota and various alerting tools. We do this to respond to incidents before they’re reported. Proactively identifying issues and communicating to customers helps us provide great experiences and fosters trust. Internally, we’ve been using these alerting tools in tandem with our auto-create incidents feature. We’ve found that it’s made responding to the pager much smoother - it’s one less thing to do when you get paged at 2am.

So you’ve decided to take advantage of Site Reliability Engineering by hiring SREs for your company. Now, you have a second decision to make: Exactly how many SREs to hire. Do you need just one or two SREs? Or should you build a sprawling SRE team, with a dozen or more SREs on hand to support your organization’s reliability needs? The answers to these questions will, of course, vary; every business’s needs are different.

You might be excited about tracking DORA metrics, but have you ever thought about the ways in which you track them, and how important accuracy is in your methods?