Site Reliability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Part III. Situational Awareness and Continuous Preparedness

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This will be Part III of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

This section shifts our focus from SRE culture and organizing principles to the operational realities of running reliable services. It explores how teams build deep visibility into their systems and establish and evolve practices for managing and learning from inevitable failures.

The foundation of situational awareness is understanding what “broken” actually means. In Chapter 7, “Service Level Objectives”, we update the SLO framework provided in the first edition of this book. This chapter moves beyond SLO basics to describe advanced implementations, such as defining SLOs based on Critical User Journeys (CUJs), handling per-customer SLOs in B2B environments, and the importance of gathering client-side telemetry.

With reliability targets established, teams need the right telemetry to see if they are meeting those targets. Chapter 8, “Observability and Monitoring” details the industry shift from traditional, metric-focused monitoring to comprehensive ...