The Site Reliability Workbook

Chapter 17. Identifying and Recovering from Overload

By Maria-Hendrike Peetz, Luis Quesada Torres, and Marilia Melo with Diane Bates

When an SRE team is running smoothly, team members should feel like they can comfortably handle all of their work. They should be able to work on tickets and still have time to work on long-term projects that make it easier to manage the service in the future. 

But sometimes circumstances get in the way of a team’s work goals. Team members take time off for long-term illnesses or move to new teams. Organizations hand down new production-wide programs for SRE. Changes to the service or the larger system introduce new technical challenges. As workload increases, team members start working longer hours to handle tickets and pages and spend less time on engineering work. The whole team starts to feel stressed and frustrated as they work harder but don’t feel like they are making progress. Stress, in turn, causes people to make more mistakes, impacting reliability and, ultimately, end users. In short, the team loses its ability to regulate its daily work and effectively manage the service.

At this point, the team needs to find a way out of this overloaded state. They need to rebalance their workload so that team members can focus on essential engineering work.

Operational load (or operational workload) is a term that describes the ongoing maintenance tasks that keep systems and services running at optimal performance. There are three distinct types of ...