SRE Best Practices for Incident Management

Understand the origins of modern incident management best practices, how they align with the emerging discipline of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and how incidents can be proactively prevented with thoughtful failure injection.

Resolve incidents faster.

Thanks for requesting SRE Best Practices for Incident Management! View the whitepaper here. (A copy has also been sent to your email.)

About the Authors

Jordan Pritchard

Director of Infrastructure & Site Reliability Engineering

Michael Kehoe

Architect of reliable, scalable infrastructure

Rodney Lester

Technical Lead, Reliability Pillar of Well Architected Program

Tammy Butow

Principal SRE

Jay Holler

Manager, Site Reliability Engineering

Ramin Keene

Founder

Download this whitepaper to learn more about:

  • The origins of the discipline of Incident Management
  • Reasons you need an Incident Management program
  • How Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) fits into Incident Management
  • The difference between DevOps and SRE
  • How Chaos Engineering can proactively prevent incidents from occuring
  • 9 best practices for building a modern incident management program at your company
  • Incident classification: SEV descriptions and levels, and SEV and time-to-detection (TTD) timelines

  • Organization-wide critical service monitoring, including key dashboards and KPI metrics emails

  • Service ownership and metrics for organizations maintaining a microservices architecture

  • Effective on-call principles for site reliability engineers, including rotation structure, alert threshold maintenance, and escalation practices

  • Chaos Engineering practices to identify random and unpredictable behavior in your system

  • Monitoring and metrics to detect incidents caused by self-healing systems

  • Creating a high-reliability culture by listening to people in your organization

Traditional ways of responding to IT incidents are no longer good enough.

In this whitepaper, you’ll hear about the rise of a concept called site reliability engineering (SRE), and how the role of this type of incident management can not only coexist with, but also strengthen a DevOps approach to development.

You’ll learn the benefits of putting a modern incident management team in place. And you’ll get a list of nine best practices for building an incident management program of your own.

In particular, you’ll hear about an emerging practice called chaos engineering that can help your incident management team excel at keeping your systems and sites functioning at top performance and stability.

Over a decade of collective experience unleashing chaos at companies like

Resolve incidents faster

Avoid downtime. Use Gremlin to turn failure into resilience.

Gremlin empowers you to proactively root out failure before it causes downtime. See how you can harness chaos to build resilient systems by requesting a demo of Gremlin.GET STARTED

Product Hero ImageShape