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Here’s What SLIs AREN’T

SLIs, or service level indicators, are powerful metrics of service health. They’re often built up from simpler metrics that are monitored from the system. SLIs transform lower-level machine data into something that captures user happiness.

Your organization might already have processes with this same goal. Techniques like real-time telemetry and using synthetic data also build metrics that meaningfully represent service health. In this article, we’ll break down how these techniques vary, and the unique benefits of adopting SLIs.

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Four Ways SRE Helps New Employees Onboard

Onboarding is an essential yet challenging part of the hiring process. As your organization matures, more of its processes become unique. This makes it harder for new employees to get up to speed. Investing in custom processes and tooling to achieve your specific goals is a valuable practice. But, you must balance this with an investment in onboarding.

Fortunately, an investment in SRE is also an investment in onboarding, as one of the important goals of SRE is to help democratize context across software teams. At first, SRE may seem like an area with a high learning curve. The diversity of the skills expected of the SRE role can make it difficult to hire for. However, these skills help broaden engineer’s abilities and understanding of their organization’s systems. The SRE mentality can provide insights into many areas, including onboarding itself.