How to Control System Complexity: Our SRE Approach to Incident Resolution

With distributed services, constantly changing environments, and many interconnected pieces, even a small issue can quickly turn into a big problem that impacts customers. In this post, I'll share the core SRE strategies we use at IT Outposts so you can stay ahead of incidents and keep your services running reliably at scale.

The first strategy is centralization. I've discussed metrics, logs, and alerts as the three pillars of monitoring for SREs many times. If they’re fragmented, though, will they still make sense? Not really. At IT Outposts, we connect all the data into one unified view that shows us exactly what's happening across the entire system and where issues are starting to emerge. Let me explain this further.?

Relying on just one metric risks jumping to the wrong conclusions about the root cause. For example, metrics may show a high load, and we could start investigating that load issue. But the actual underlying problem may not be the load itself — it could be something completely different. And when you only have disjointed data to go on, you risk wasting precious time heading down the wrong path while an incident keeps escalating.

Next, if we speak about SRE, I can't help but mention service level objectives (SLO). These are the targets you set for the performance and reliability of your services or applications. They define the level of uptime, responsiveness, and overall health you want to maintain for each component.?

For example, you might set an SLO that says, "The shopping cart service must be available 99.9% of the time" or "The checkout process needs to be complete within 2 seconds for 95% of requests."

These SLOs make it clear and quantifiable what level of service is acceptable versus when there’s a problem that needs attention. If uptime or latency falls below the defined SLO, it triggers the team to investigate and fix the issue.

What’s more, SLOs let you prioritize which services are most critical to the user experience. You'd set a higher availability SLO of 99.99% for the checkout flow than for something like a blog engine that has lower traffic and impact.

As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So, the third strategy of SRE is, of course, proactivity. Our teams leverage telemetry data to identify risk factors and precursor signals that an incident could be on the horizon. For example, storage metrics may show disk usage trends, indicating a service will hit capacity within the next 12 hours.

SRE may have emerged from cloud pioneers like Google, but it's now a critical discipline for any business. With the right strategies in place, you can spend less time firefighting and more time delivering amazing products and experiences for your customers. That’s how you turn system complexity from fragile to resilient.