Devops for Growth

Proactive SRE Goes Past the Golden Signals

While monitoring the golden signals is a great start to understanding incidents in your service, SRE teams of the future are proactively learning more about their system through numerous additional techniques. By running organized tests in both staging and production, SRE teams can actively learn about their systems and use the information to build reliability into their services.

• Chaos Engineering: Chaos engineering is a discipline used by teams to experiment on their systems to proactively detect failure points or potential weaknesses. By actively injecting chaos into your service, you can see exactly how the system responds to different circumstances.

• Game Days: While chaos engineering is geared toward understanding your system, game days can be used to understand your people. Game days are used to test the resiliency of your team when it comes to incident response and remediation. You can use the learnings from game days to develop more efficient processes or determine the need for new tools that make people more efficient.

• Synthetic Monitoring: The use of synthetic monitoring allows teams to create artificial users and simulate user behavior through a service. You can determine specific artificial behavior flows in order to learn more about how your system responds under pressure. Synthetic monitoring is an excellent method for granularly testing and determining the reliability of specific services within your greater system.

SRE’s golden signals need to be monitored by any team looking to visibly measure the health of a system. But, knowing the health and general reliability of a system is far different from taking actions to improve a system’s reliability. In today’s ecosystem of highly distributed systems and rapid deployment, SRE teams have their work cut out for them. But, the golden signals of monitoring and SRE can help you achieve a healthy starting point from which you can constantly improve to become more proactive with SRE.