Observability and SRE
Observability is a fundamental aspect of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). These two concepts share a lot of the similar goals of ensuring reliability and performance of software systems. The three pillars of observability — logs, metrics, and traces — are widely used in both disciplines to operate and maintain complex systems.
What is observability
Observability is the ability to gain insights into the internal state of applications as well as the health of the overall system. This is achieved by collecting and analyzing data such as logs, metrics, and traces. The goal of observability is to understand the system’s health beyond simply collecting data and alerting on issues.
What is SRE
SRE is a discipline pioneered by Google as they codified best practices for service reliability into a specialized role. SRE combines aspects of software development processes and IT operations into a set of practices and tools to scale, maintain, and operate large systems.
These key principles include:
- Monitoring: SRE measures service-level indicators (SLIs), service-level objectives (SLOs), and service-level agreements (SLAs) to benchmark performance and reliability targets.
- Automation: SRE implements policies and checks to promote automation throughout every stage of the software development process. Monitoring is embedded into the build process, and system resilience is prioritized.
- Reliability: SRE practices advocate for a smaller set of changes to reduce risks introduced by new features.
How does observability relate to SRE
Observability provides the data and tools necessary for SRE to function properly. For example, SRE teams can measure system reliability by collecting the following metrics: latency, traffic, errors, and saturation (commonly known as the Four Golden Signals).
Observability can help surface data to measure service-level indicators such as uptime, system throughput, or response times.
SRE teams also need logs and traces to respond to outages and problems in a timely manner.
Finally, data from observability tools influences decisions for capacity planning and scaling to deal with fluctuating demand.
Observability and SRE work in tandem to provide numerous benefits to software engineering teams. An SRE team with better observability can collaborate with development and operations teams to build and maintain more reliable and performant systems.
In turn, customers can expect better system outcomes, while development teams can focus on continually improving their product.