Site Reliability Engineering

Site Reliability Engineering treats reliability as something measurable, not a matter of luck — service level objectives and error budgets instead of vague uptime targets, and observability built in rather than bolted on after an incident.

In practice, that means dashboards and alerts that reflect what users actually experience, not just whatever happens to be easy to measure, and systems instrumented well enough to debug at short notice, not just during office hours.

Problems this usually starts from

These are the kinds of things that usually prompt someone to get in touch:

• Alerts fire constantly and everyone’s learned to ignore them.
• Dashboards exist, but nobody trusts them during an actual incident.
• On-call means guessing which system is actually the problem, not being told.
• Nobody’s agreed what “reliable enough” means, so every outage becomes a debate.
• Logs, metrics, and traces live in three different places that don’t talk to each other.
• Observability was bolted on after the fact, so it’s missing exactly what’s needed mid-incident.
• Postmortems happen, but the same class of incident keeps coming back regardless.

What an engagement looks like

Starts with understanding what’s actually being measured today, and where the gaps are between what the dashboards show and what users experience. From there: agreeing SLOs and error budgets that reflect something real, tightening alerting so it’s signal rather than noise, and building or consolidating the observability stack — Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Mimir — so an incident at 3am doesn’t start with “which dashboard do I even look at.”

Scope is either a fixed piece of work (an observability audit, a migration between tools) or an ongoing placement embedded with the team. Deliverables are things that stay useful after the engagement ends: dashboards that reflect reality, alerts people actually respond to, and runbooks documented well enough for whoever’s on call next.

Typical work looks like: SLOs tied to what users actually notice, rather than infrastructure metrics that happen to be easy to graph; Grafana dashboards built for the incident they’ll actually be used in, not a general-purpose overview nobody opens until something’s already broken; and Loki/Mimir pipelines that make “where do I even look” a five-second answer instead of a five-minute one.

Engagements typically run anywhere from a few days for a focused audit up to several months for an ongoing placement — there’s no minimum contract length, and scope can start small and grow once it’s clear the working relationship fits.