Field reference Updated
The numbers and practices SREs look up every week
A site reliability engineering (SRE) reference: downtime allowances, error budgets, burn-rate alerts, incidents and on-call. Short, sourced and calculated.
Tools
Reliability targets
- SLI vs SLO vs SLAWhat each term means, how to choose indicators and targets, and example SLOs by service type.
- Error budget policyWhat happens when the budget runs out, with a policy template you can adapt.
- RTO vs RPORecovery time and recovery point objectives, with worked recovery examples and DR patterns.
- Multiwindow, multi-burn-rate alertingWhy burn-rate alerts beat threshold alerts, the 14.4/6/1 parameters, and Prometheus rules.
Incidents
- Incident severity levelsA SEV1–SEV4 matrix with criteria, response expectations and common pitfalls.
- Blameless postmortem templateA copyable incident review template and guidance on writing one without blame.
- Runbook templateA copyable Markdown runbook for on-call alerts, with a filled example and upkeep advice.
Operations
- On-call basicsRotation sizing, shift load, escalation, handoffs and keeping on-call sustainable.
- Toil: definition and how to reduce itThe six properties of toil, how to measure it, and what to automate first.
- Golden signals, RED and USEThree monitoring frameworks compared, with what to measure for services and resources.