TechAni
Reliability Engineering Discovery

Balance reliability with velocity through measurable guardrails

Evaluate how SLO management, observability, incident response, and resilience practices support your organization. Each module below highlights discovery prompts and the implementation blueprint TechAni brings to the table.

SLOs, SLIs & Error Budgets

Define measurable, user-centric reliability targets and tie them to deployment velocity and prioritization decisions.

Discovery Questions

  • Do all critical services have defined SLIs and SLOs?
  • Who owns defining and reviewing them—product, engineering, or operations?
  • How are SLOs measured, tracked, and reported?
  • Are SLOs visible to teams in real time?
  • How often are SLOs revisited or recalibrated?
  • Are SLO violations linked to error budgets that inform roadmap decisions?
  • How are trade-offs between velocity and reliability made?

Evidence to Collect

  • SLO dashboards and reports
  • SLI query definitions
  • Reliability review notes

SLI/SLO Framework

Design SLIs around user journeys and automate SLO compliance reporting.

PrometheusGrafanaSlothOpenSLO

Implementation Steps

  1. →Instrument availability and latency SLIs with Prometheus recording rules.
  2. →Use Sloth or Pyrra to codify SLOs and generate alerting burn-rate policies.
  3. →Publish shared dashboards showing real-time error budget status.
  4. →Automate compliance reports for stakeholders and product teams.

Error Budget Policy

Align release velocity with error budget consumption through explicit policy gates.

Implementation Steps

  1. →Define budget states (healthy, watch, exhausted) with clear actions.
  2. →Freeze feature work and trigger a reliability swarm when budgets exhaust.
  3. →Integrate budget checks into deployment pipelines and change approvals.

Observability & Monitoring

Create unified telemetry that empowers fast detection, diagnosis, and learning.

Discovery Questions

  • What observability stack is in use (metrics, logs, traces)?
  • Are telemetry signals unified and correlated across services?
  • Are alerts tied to user impact or infrastructure symptoms?
  • How is alert fatigue mitigated today?
  • Are runbooks standardized and easily accessible?
  • Is instrumentation automated or manual?
  • Do teams know how to interpret observability data?

Evidence to Collect

  • Architecture diagrams
  • Alert definitions
  • Runbooks and dashboards

OpenTelemetry Standardization

Adopt vendor-neutral instrumentation for metrics, logs, and traces.

OpenTelemetryTempoLokiGrafana

Implementation Steps

  1. →Deploy OpenTelemetry collectors as daemonsets or sidecars.
  2. →Auto-instrument services with SDKs or agents.
  3. →Correlate request IDs between traces, logs, and metrics dashboards.
  4. →Build service maps and dependency graphs for rapid triage.

Alert Design Philosophy

Move from noisy infrastructure alerts to user-symptom-based notifications.

Implementation Steps

  1. →Adopt multi-window, multi-burn-rate alerting to protect budgets.
  2. →Provide runbook links and recent change context in every alert payload.
  3. →Aggregate related alerts and empower easy silencing for maintenance windows.

Incident Management

Mature the end-to-end incident lifecycle from detection to learning.

Discovery Questions

  • How are incidents detected, classified, and escalated?
  • What are the detection, acknowledgement, and resolution times?
  • Are incident roles and responsibilities clearly defined?
  • Are postmortems blameless and action-oriented?
  • How do lessons learned feed back into product and platform roadmaps?

Evidence to Collect

  • Incident response playbooks
  • On-call schedules
  • Postmortem archives

Incident Response Framework

Codify roles, rituals, and tooling for calm, repeatable incident handling.

PagerDutyIncident.ioStatuspage

Implementation Steps

  1. →Establish incident commander, communications, and scribe roles.
  2. →Automate Slack/Teams war-room creation and timeline capture.
  3. →Provide stakeholder communications templates and status page workflows.

Blameless Postmortems

Turn incidents into durable improvement through structured learning.

Implementation Steps

  1. →Adopt a shared postmortem template with timeline, root cause, and actions.
  2. →Track follow-up items in engineering work management systems.
  3. →Share wins and lessons learned across teams regularly.

Resilience & Testing

Validate resilience assumptions and orchestrate graceful degradation.

Discovery Questions

  • Is chaos testing performed regularly?
  • How frequently are failovers rehearsed?
  • Are active-active or multi-region strategies in place?
  • How is capacity managed and forecasted?
  • How are cascading failures prevented or contained?

Evidence to Collect

  • Chaos experiment results
  • DR drill reports
  • Load testing data

Chaos Engineering Practice

Introduce failure injection to build confidence in resilience design.

Chaos MeshLitmusGremlin

Implementation Steps

  1. →Prioritize chaos experiments for critical services (pod kills, network latency).
  2. →Schedule game days with cross-functional participation.
  3. →Automate rollback and recovery drills across environments.

Multi-Region Architectures

Design active-active footprints with clear RTO/RPO targets.

Route 53Global AcceleratorCockroachDB

Implementation Steps

  1. →Replicate critical services across at least two geographic regions.
  2. →Implement health-checked global load balancing.
  3. →Automate DR drills and publish RTO/RPO performance.

Toil & Automation

Quantify manual operations work and target it for elimination.

Discovery Questions

  • What percentage of SRE time is spent on manual toil?
  • Is toil tracked and prioritized for automation?
  • How standardized are configuration and change processes?
  • What automation exists for frequent operational tasks?

Evidence to Collect

  • Toil reports
  • Automation backlogs
  • Runbooks

Toil Tracking Program

Measure and cap toil so SREs can focus on engineering improvements.

JiraLinearCustom dashboards

Implementation Steps

  1. →Define toil attributes (manual, repetitive, automatable, no enduring value).
  2. →Mandate toil logging for operational tasks consuming significant effort.
  3. →Set quarterly toil reduction targets (keep toil < 50% of SRE time).

Automation Playbook

Surface high-impact automation opportunities and standard patterns.

AnsibleTerraformPythonKubernetes Operators

Implementation Steps

  1. →Automate provisioning through IaC and GitOps pipelines.
  2. →Implement auto-remediation scripts for recurring incidents.
  3. →Automate certificate rotation, backups, and DR validation.