In its DevOps 2021 survey of global IT professionals, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) found that 95% of organizations with highly successful DevOps initiatives were predominantly decentralized and purposefully becoming more so as fast as possible (see Figure 1). This decentralization of development and DevOps teams is making site reliability engineering (SRE) both critical and difficult to achieve.

Wondering what Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are? In this article, we will explain service level objectives and how they relate to SLAs, SLIs, and error budgets. A Service Level Objective (SLO) is a reliability target, measured by a Service Level Indicator (SLI) and sometimes serves as a safeguard for a Service Level Agreement (SLA). SLOs represent customer happiness and guide the development team’s velocity.

SLIs, or service level indicators, are powerful metrics of service health. They’re often built up from simpler metrics that are monitored from the system. SLIs transform lower level machine data into something that captures user happiness. Your organization might already have processes with this same goal. Techniques like real-time telemetry and using synthetic data also build metrics that meaningfully represent service health.

Smartsheet was founded in 2005 with the mission of helping companies simplify and streamline how work is managed. Over three quarters of the Fortune 500 rely on Smartsheet. Through its enterprise platform for dynamic work, the platform aligns people and technology to help businesses move faster, drive innovation, and achieve more.

We have an exciting announcement. Blameless is providing early access to our Microsoft Teams integration. SRE and engineering teams can now resolve incidents faster without leaving the comfort of their favorite messaging tool. With the Blameless incident resolution product, Microsoft Teams users can now reduce toil in routine incident response processes through automation, codify processes with checklists, and craft retrospectives with the ‘add to timeline’ command.

At Lowe’s, we’ve made significant progress in our multiyear technology transformation. To modernize our systems and build new capabilities for our customers and associates, we leverage Google’s SRE framework and Google Cloud, which helps us meet their needs faster and more effectively. With these efforts, we’ve been able to go from one release every two weeks to 20+ releases daily—about 20X more releases per month.

Sometimes, as these 4 incidents highlight, major failure results from a mere typo or configuration oversight.

Wondering what error budgets (EBs) are and how they are useful? We explain what they are, how they are defined, and how they can help your team. An error budget is the amount of acceptable unreliability a service can have before customer happiness is impacted. If a service is well within its budget, the developers can take more risks in their releases. If not, developers need to make safer choices.