Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Our industry has always had localized expressions for work that was necessary but didn’t move the company forward. The SRE movement calls this type of work “toil.” The concept of toil is a unifying force because it provides an impartial framework for identifying — then containing — the work that takes up our time, blocks people from fulfilling their engineering potential, and doesn’t move the company forward.

We spoke with two members from the SRE team, Alex Blyth and Zulhilmi Zainudin, to learn more about their role at Civo. Through this series, we aim to provide you with an overview of the different roles we have at Civo and what advice our team has. You can discover more about our team in our “day in the life of a Go Dev” and “day in the life of an Intern” blog.

Mean time to resolution (MTTR) is a metric that transcends industry and technology. It’s a measure of how quickly, on average, support teams identify, act, and resolve IT issues and incidents. Because MTTR directly relates to service quality, maintaining a low MTTR is a critical goal for DevOps and SRE teams. These teams have a vested interest in resolving issues quickly because escalating incidents to higher levels of the support team increases response and resolution times.

I’ve had the honor and privilege of authoring The SRE Report for the last three years. For the 2023 version, this included working with some amazing individuals like Anna Jones, Kurt Andersen, and Steve McGhee. Download The SRE Report 2023 here (no registration required).

Let's be honest, nobody loves surveys. Ok, well I sure don't. But surveys satisfy a huge need in our demand for insights into complex human-computer, sociotechnical systems. It turns out that we've been measuring the computer part pretty well, but the humans – not as easy to keep track of. When Google SRE first defined toil as a metric we wanted to reduce, we spent far too long trying to quantify it numerically based on tooling and insights from computer systems.

A guide to set practical Service Level Objectives (SLOs) & Service Level Indicators (SLIs) for your Site Reliability Engineering practices.

One of the key attributes of DevOps and SRE engineers is their ability to meticulously observe and monitor all of their applications. A task which can be achieved more efficiently by centralizing all generated logs to a central endpoint. By centralizing logging, engineers can, at any time, have an accurate overview of all events which take place across their applications, from just one place. Storing logs in an external system also allows companies to ensure compliance with many certifications.