api: YAML JSON TOON Database
version: 1.0.0
format: yaml
dataset:
  id: 2894
  slug: site-reliability-practices
  title: Site Reliability Practices
  description: Key concepts from site reliability engineering.
  summary: "The vocabulary of site reliability engineering: service-level indicators, objectives and agreements, error budgets, incident response and chaos engineering, with the metrics and routines around them such as MTTR, toil, postmortems, runbooks and the four golden signals."
  use_when:
    - You are setting reliability targets or writing an incident process.
    - You need precise definitions that teams can share.
  caveats:
    - The terms come from large-scale operations; scale them down for small teams rather than copying them whole.
    - Metrics such as MTTR are averages and can hide long-tail incidents.
  related:
    - monitoring-logging-tools
    - cicd-pipeline-stages
    - version-control-workflows
  entry_count: 16
  fields:
    - section: data
      field: term
      type: string
      example: SLI
    - section: data
      field: description
      type: string
      example: "Service Level Indicator: a measurable aspect of…"
  category: DevOps
  category_slug: devops
  tags: devops,sre,reliability
  view_count: 57
  created_at: 1793403093
  updated_at: 1793403093
data:
  - term: SLI
    description: "Service Level Indicator: a measurable aspect of service level."
  - term: SLO
    description: "Service Level Objective: target value for an SLI over time."
  - term: SLA
    description: "Service Level Agreement: contractual consequences for missing SLOs."
  - term: Error Budget
    description: Allowed amount of unreliability derived from the SLO.
  - term: Incident Response
    description: Process for responding to and resolving service disruptions.
  - term: Chaos Engineering
    description: Intentionally injecting failures to validate resilience.
  - term: MTTR
    description: "Mean time to recovery: the average time to restore service after a failure."
  - term: MTTD
    description: "Mean time to detect: the average time between a failure beginning and its detection."
  - term: MTBF
    description: "Mean time between failures: the average operating time between failures of a system."
  - term: Toil
    description: Manual, repetitive, automatable operational work that scales with service size and adds no lasting value.
  - term: Blameless Postmortem
    description: A written review of an incident that records timeline, causes and follow-ups without assigning personal blame.
  - term: Runbook
    description: Documented steps for handling a known alert or operation so responders act consistently.
  - term: Canary Release
    description: Releasing a change to a small share of traffic first and expanding only if metrics stay healthy.
  - term: Blue-Green Deployment
    description: Running two identical environments and switching traffic from the old to the new, allowing instant rollback.
  - term: Four Golden Signals
    description: "Latency, traffic, errors and saturation: the four metrics Google's SRE book recommends monitoring for any service."
  - term: Capacity Planning
    description: Forecasting demand and provisioning enough resources to meet objectives without large waste.