Reduce Toil and Boost Productivity with Better Alerting Solutions

Ever-increasing toil can quickly drain your SRE team’s morale and productivity. This blog explores how well-designed alerting systems can combat toil and empower your team.

What is Toil?

Google’s SRE workbook defines toil as “the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows.”

To effectively tackle toil, we first need to identify its characteristics and measure the time it takes to resolve incidents manually.

Identifying and Measuring Toil

• Identify toil by evaluating tasks based on the type of work involved, who performs it, how it’s completed, and its difficulty level.
• Measure toil by analyzing trends in on-call incident responses, tickets, and survey data. This data will help you prioritize toil reduction to ensure SREs spend more time on production-related functionalities. Ideally, toil shouldn’t occupy more than 50% of an SRE’s time.

The Detrimental Effects of Toil

Repetitive tasks can lead to discontent and burnout among SREs, causing alert fatigue and increased attrition rates. This ultimately slows down development processes.

Common Causes of Toil in Alerting Systems

1. Lack of Automation: Manual intervention for repetitive alerts is a major source of toil. Automate alert responses whenever possible to significantly reduce alert noise.
2. Poor Alert Configuration: Poorly configured systems generate either too many alerts (over-sensitivity) or none at all (under-sensitivity).

• Over-sensitivity: This occurs when alerts are triggered by marginal deviations from set thresholds. Instead, use relative values like “not less than 50%” to avoid alert floods.
• Under-sensitivity: Undetected issues due to a lack of alerts can lead to major outages. Re-engineer your system to address sensitivity issues.

1. Ignoring SRE Golden Signals: These signals — Latency, Traffic, Errors, and Saturation (or USE and RED variations) — are crucial for monitoring system health. Utilize these signals to set up alerts for database utilization, CPU, and memory to avoid unnecessary toil caused by abnormalities.
2. Insufficient Alert Information: Alerts without specifics waste valuable time troubleshooting. Ensure alerts provide clear details like IP addresses or hostnames to expedite incident resolution.

Reduce Toil with Effective Alerting Solutions

1. Set Alert Rules Based on Historical Performance: Analyze historical trends and rate of change in system performance metrics to establish optimal alert thresholds. This will significantly reduce unnecessary alerts.
2. Create Proactive Alerts: Proactive alerts leverage predictive capabilities to identify potential future threats.

• Investigative Alerts: These identify long-term system health risks. Ensure they are properly aligned with other alerting strategies to avoid toil.
• Proactive Alerts: Configure alerts to warn you before issues escalate into outages. For example, set storage utilization alerts at 70% to give your team time to address storage concerns before reaching capacity.
• Reactive Alerts: These indicate immediate threats like unexpected outages. While crucial, strive to minimize reactive alerts through proactive measures.

1. Implement Alert-as-Code: Define system alerts as code for more specific incident identification with monitoring tools. This can be done during system build using infrastructure-as-code architecture. Alert-as-code offers several benefits:

• Automates routine tasks for greater infrastructure control with version control platforms.
• Saves time by standardizing complex and dynamic systems.
• Supports documentation for future reference.
• Cloud Monitoring APIs can also be used to manage alerts, enabling real-time monitoring, event trigger identification, and flagging potential system issues.
• Programmatic Alerting Policies create alerts only for deviations from historical system performance, reducing unnecessary alerts.

How Squadcast’s Alerting Solutions Can Help

Squadcast offers unique features to streamline high-priority alerts and boost SRE team productivity:

• Alert Suppression: Reduce alert fatigue by suppressing non-critical alerts, allowing SREs to focus on severe incidents.
• Contextual Tagging, Routing, and Escalation: Prioritize alerts with customizable tags and route them to specific teams or users for faster response.
• Incident Deduplication: Eliminate duplicate alerts from various sources for clearer incident diagnosis, especially in high-failure rate services.
• On-Call Traffic Analysis: Gain insights into on-call traffic distribution, status during recovery, and MTTR/MTTA analysis. Use this data to identify and rectify toil-inducing activities.

Conclusion

The right alerting solutions combined with automation strategies are key to creating an effective and toil-free incident management environment. This approach not only reduces operational