SRE Cheat Sheet

Core Metrics

• SLI (Service Level Indicator): What you measure (e.g., latency).
• SLO (Service Level Objective): Your target (e.g., 99.9% < 200ms).
• SLA (Service Level Agreement): The business contract with consequences.
• Error Budget: 100% - SLO (The allowance for unreliability).

Incident Command Roles

• Incident Commander: Leads the response, does not perform hands-on fixes.
• Ops / SME: Investigates and mitigates the issue.
• Communications: Handles external and internal stakeholder updates.

Automation & Toil

• Toil: Manual, repetitive work scaling linearly.
• Goal: Cap toil at 50% of SRE time. Use automation to eliminate it.