How Developers Can Help SREs with Observability

Achieving reliability is a team effort. The more developers and SREs collaborate, the greater the success of the product. This blog explores five best practices that developers can adopt to streamline SRE workflows and improve system observability.

Introduction

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a demanding field. SREs are tasked with monitoring system infrastructure and aligning it with key reliability metrics. Developers, on the other hand, focus on delivering high-quality software.

While the goals may seem distinct, developers and SREs share a common purpose: ensuring a product’s success. To achieve this, both teams must collaborate to create a reliable system. This fosters a transparent and efficient development process, allowing developers to build solutions faster and SREs to manage applications more effectively.

What Developers Can Do to Enhance SRE Observability

Developers and SREs are two sides of the same coin within a tech company. While developers strive to deliver successful software, SREs ensure its uptime and overall health.

Software development is an iterative process. Following delivery, it’s crucial to monitor the software’s health and performance characteristics. SRE practices are instrumental in guaranteeing product reliability. SREs are responsible for ensuring the software functions as expected.

To empower SREs, effective collaboration is necessary. SREs and software engineers must work with a vast array of data, including response times and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) from virtualized layers within cloud platforms. In essence, developers can significantly improve SRE observability by ensuring the source code is easy to understand, access, and modify for system performance optimization.

Following are five ways developers can improve SRE observability:

1. Building with the 12-Factor App Methodology in Mind

The 12-factor app methodology is a modern approach to web application development. By design, 12-factor apps are stateless and immutable. This enables deployment across any cloud environment, such as Heroku, where developers may not have complete control over the underlying infrastructure.

The twelve factors of this scalable approach to application building encompass codebase, dependencies, configuration, backing services, build, release, run processes, port binding, concurrency, disposability, Dev/Prod parity, logs, and admin processes. These factors are designed to accommodate polyglot programming.

The core objective of this methodology is runtime independence. In other words, applications can be executed in any environment without encountering operational difficulties in the cloud. This approach dictates an app’s packaging, deployment, and runtime.

The 12-factor app methodology offers a powerful approach to establishing a resilient architecture that minimizes failure points and functions seamlessly on local or cloud backends. This approach yields numerous benefits, including safe deployment, high availability, auto-scaling, horizontal scaling, statelessness, location transparency, and dynamic configuration.

Furthermore, the 12-factor app methodology is used to structure applications or systems for portability, scalability, and stability when deployed to any cloud provider. This significantly reduces the workload for SREs.

1. Sharing Performance Testing Data Insights

Performance testing is a software testing practice that evaluates software functionality under various complex conditions.

SREs rely on performance testing metrics to understand application thresholds. This knowledge empowers them to make informed decisions to optimize application performance.

For instance, in the context of backend applications, developers might use tools like Gatling to load test applications and measure their load capacity. This data should be shared with the SRE team as well.

There may be some overlap between the 12-factor app method and the approaches that follow. However, each approach plays a role in fostering synergy between development and operations teams.

1. The Importance of Documentation and Configuration Files

Well-defined documentation is paramount for SRE team success. SREs require access to clear documentation associated with various SRE functions. This empowers them to locate the most relevant documentation for troubleshooting outages.

Configuration files allow you to modify your application’s configuration without modifying the source code. These files store website-specific information such as passwords, login credentials, database connection strings (URLs), usernames, passwords, API addresses of dependent/auxiliary services, application-specific parameters, and more. They provide a mechanism to track and control various data points pertaining to your web applications.

Configuration variables act like parameters within the code that can change based on external factors, such as the URL of another web service, database, or queue. For example, if you are configuring the “token” module, the configuration file will specify the available token types and how to use each one.

The configuration file should also detail the default values of each token, any dependencies on other tokens, and any special cases defined for that particular token. During incident response, SREs rely on configuration files to restore system infrastructure.

1. AIOps-Enabled System Administration Functionalities

Site reliability engineers (SREs) are frequently tasked with rebooting and deploying servers, even during periods of zero downtime. This can be a significant undertaking when deploying updates in production.

To streamline this process, the SRE team should be notified of system changes via configuration files or documentation accessible through the admin dashboard. This can also be achieved by developing custom Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) solutions.

AIOps utilizes AI-powered methods and tools to assist SREs in maintaining and operating data centers. For example, these AI-based tools can aid in root cause analysis for remediation, automated anomaly detection, optimization, and the automatic initiation of self-stabilizing activities.

1. Increasing System Observability

Cloud-native systems are becoming increasingly intricate, making observability an essential practice. A system with high observability provides clear insight into potential problems and how various systems interact with each other. Observability maximizes visibility into the infrastructure.

Observability tools are highly valuable in the DevOps and SRE worlds. These tools offer a wealth of data on logs, metrics, error rates, traces, and even network interface information. Application performance monitoring (APM), on the other hand, is a method for tracking your application’s code performance. These tools assist in identifying and resolving application performance issues.

Developers can significantly improve SRE observability by enabling debug support. This can be achieved by allowing applications to expose relevant metrics, such as request count and details regarding successful/failed requests, in the case of a web service. This data empowers SREs to determine how the application is performing in production and whether it necessitates scaling up or out.

Final Thoughts

By adopting these best practices, developers can significantly improve SRE workflows and streamline SRE observability. We encourage you to share your experiences with how these five practices have helped an SRE organize their daily tasks and become more productive.

Squadcast is an incident management tool designed specifically for SREs. It eliminates unwanted alerts, delivers relevant notifications, and integrates with popular ChatOps tools. Squadcast fosters collaboration using virtual incident war rooms and automates tasks to reduce toil.