Book Image

Real-World SRE

By : Pavlos Ratis, Nat Welch
Book Image

Real-World SRE

By: Pavlos Ratis, Nat Welch

Overview of this book

Real-World SRE is the go-to survival guide for the software developer in the middle of catastrophic website failure. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) has emerged on the frontline as businesses strive to maximize uptime. This book is a step-by-step framework to follow when your website is down and the countdown is on to fix it. Nat Welch has battle-hardened experience in reliability engineering at some of the biggest outage-sensitive companies on the internet. Arm yourself with his tried-and-tested methods for monitoring modern web services, setting up alerts, and evaluating your incident response. Real-World SRE goes beyond just reacting to disaster—uncover the tools and strategies needed to safely test and release software, plan for long-term growth, and foresee future bottlenecks. Real-World SRE gives you the capability to set up your own robust plan of action to see you through a company-wide website crisis. The final chapter of Real-World SRE is dedicated to acing SRE interviews, either in getting a first job or a valued promotion.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Real-World SRE
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Why monitoring?


Everyone tells you to go to the doctor regularly, but why should you? What are the benefits? My parents would say that you should go to the doctor to catch signs of things that you do not necessarily pay attention to, or notice, by yourself. This could be things like cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and skin cancer. I also like to use doctor visits as a time to think about and talk about changes that I have noticed in my body. For example, if I have had an upset stomach frequently.

These examples work as good comparisons of the two separate types of monitoring that software often needs. The first type is metrics and the second is logs. Metrics, in this case, are number measurements. Traditionally, metrics focused on performance numbers, like the percentage of disk space used, or the number of packets received, or the CPU load. These days, they can be used to represent just about anything that can be defined as a numerical value. They can come from any piece of software...