Topic: sre
-
Alert hygiene for host monitoring: rate over threshold, failed units, and duration windows
A page should mean a human must act now; a host disk approaching full should page on its fill rate, not a fixed percentage that a slow-growing partition can sit near for months, and a threshold crossed for an instant should not page at all. Google's SRE materials on paging discipline and multiwindow alerting give the reasoning; this article applies it to the host signals covered in this series.
-
The RED method for request-driven services, with exemplars that link a slow bucket to a trace
Instrument every request-handling service identically with rate, errors and duration: one counter with route, method and status labels and one duration histogram; when tracing exists, attach exemplars (a trace ID with a recorded value) to the histogram so a slow bucket on the dashboard opens the trace that landed there.
-
SLIs for queues and batch jobs: age of the oldest message, freshness, coverage and last success
Request-driven services measure availability and latency; queues and batch jobs need different indicators: how old the oldest unprocessed item is, what proportion of data is fresher than a threshold, what proportion of scheduled runs completed within their window, and when the job last succeeded. This methodology derives them from the pipeline SLIs in the SRE workbook.
Machine-readable: JSON