Best practices, guides, and insights for staying on top of what matters across your company.
Ask five people at your company what an SLA is and you'll get five different answers. Some say it's a customer contract. Some say it's your uptime target. Some use it for internal response time goals. The confusion is common - but getting the distinction right matters for how you set goals, hold teams accountable, and communicate reliability to customers who depend on it.
MTTR dropped from 40 min to 10 min. But that's only 70% of the picture. The real win: engineers sleeping through on-call shifts. Mean time metrics are the most tracked reliability numbers in engineering - and the most misunderstood. This guide covers what each one actually measures, how to calculate them correctly, and how to use them to drive real improvement instead of just better-looking dashboards.
Most systems generate hundreds of metrics. Most of them don't tell you whether users are having a good experience. Google's four golden signals cut through that noise - latency, traffic, errors, and saturation are the four metrics that, together, catch virtually every meaningful failure mode. Here's how to measure and alert on each one correctly.
At 2am with three engineers and five things going wrong, which do you fix first? If the answer depends on who's on call, you have a prioritization problem. An incident priority matrix takes that decision out of the individual's head and puts it into a shared framework - so the right incidents get the right attention, every time.
Your monitoring stack is solid. Datadog, PagerDuty, GitHub, Slack - all connected, all alerting. And your MTTR is still 40 minutes. The tools aren't the problem. The gap between "we know something is wrong" and "we know what to do about it" is the operations intelligence problem - and it's not solved by adding another monitoring tool.
Atlassian is sunsetting Opsgenie as a standalone product. Thousands of teams need a migration path. This is an honest breakdown of the real alternatives - what each does well, where each falls short, and how to pick the right one based on what your team actually needs, not what sounds best in a demo.
Your on-call engineer's phone goes off six times before 3am. By night three, they stop reaching for it with urgency. That's alert fatigue - and it's not a people problem, it's a systems problem. Here's what actually causes it, what it costs in MTTR and retention, and how to fix it structurally.
99.999% availability sounds like the gold standard. In practice it means your system can be down for 5 minutes per year - total. One deployment rollback and you've already missed it. Here's what five nines actually requires, what each level of the nines costs, and how to set the right target for your system.
Three acronyms used interchangeably, rarely defined precisely. SLIs are measurements. SLOs are targets. SLAs are contracts with consequences. Getting the hierarchy right changes how your team talks about reliability - and how you make deployment decisions at 2am.
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