Course: Network Admin to Site Reliability Engineer – Part 4: Site Reliability Engineer

When adding a new site reliability engineer (SRE) to your team, it's important that the new member not only has the required skills but also receives the proper training. This allows the new SRE to fit into the team and get up to speed as quickly as possible. In this course, you'll learn about the best practices for onboarding a new SRE team member, including methods and tools that can be used during the onboarding process. Next, you'll explore the technical skills that an SRE requires, including the ability to reverse engineer an application to determine the root cause of a problem. Finally, you'll examine the skills and knowledge an SRE requires when on-call, including those needed to provide support and manage support issues.

To ensure and maintain a system's functional state, site reliability engineers (SRE) must learn how to identify, calculate, and manage a system's operational load, which generally falls into three categories: ongoing operation activities, tickets, and pages. In this course, you'll explore these categories in detail. You'll start by outlining methods for managing operational loads at the team level and using support ticketing systems and service level objectives. Next, you'll investigate 'toil,' a term used to describe the operational work associated with running and maintaining a production service. You'll outline steps for identifying, calculating, and eliminating toil and examine the adverse effects toil can have on a team. Additionally, you'll outline how to work with interrupts and distinguish between crucial metrics used for managing them. Lastly, you'll identify the human element factors to consider when dealing with interrupts, including efficiency, distractibility, and respect.

Site reliability engineers (SREs) are responsible for many administrative tasks, often splitting their time between reactive ops work and special projects. To ensure teams do not become overloaded, SREs may be transferred to a team in order to prevent or help mitigate overload. In this course, you will learn how to deal with operational overload. You'll start by examining ops mode, which is an approach used to ensure services are properly maintained and optimized. You'll discover factors that contribute to team morale and stress. In addition, you will outline emergency planning strategies and best practices, as well as learn how to categorize emergencies and prepare detailed emergency plans. Next, you'll explore how knowledge sharing relates to emergency preparedness, the key to writing successful postmortems, the importance of service level objectives, and how an appropriate level of detail is required to properly explain your findings. Lastly, you'll discover the key factors and attributes of successful teams. You'll examine a team-first approach and differentiate between questioning techniques such as open/closed, funnel, probing, and leading.

Collaboration is key to getting the most out of your team and ensuring your clients receive their desired service. In this course, you'll learn to collaborate and communicate as an SRE effectively. You'll learn how to run traditional and virtual meetings to ensure maximum effectiveness and productivity, whether it's with customers, internal or external team members, or distributed teams. You'll examine how to plan, carry out, and post-analyze meetings using best practices and sufficient preparation, tailoring these methods to suit the participants and the end-goal. You'll delve into the unique characteristics of different meeting types, such as those for problem-solving or innovation. You'll explore the advantages and challenges of SRE pair programming. You'll then end the course by investigating some helpful collaboration and communication tools.

To improve the chances of creating, monitoring, and maintaining a successful software development project, site reliability engineers and all team members must be aware of which metrics to measure. They also need a working knowledge of both automated and manual testing methods. In this course, you'll learn how to manage and select SRE metrics and how various testing methods work. You'll begin by learning what metrics need to be measured for project management, software development, and APIs - examining in detail CI/CD, cloud API, and software project metrics, to name a few. Next, you'll compare both manual and automated testing methods and the goals of each. Lastly, you'll investigate automated testing frameworks and platforms, test cases and types, and best practices and pitfalls to consider.

Once SRE metrics have been identified, site reliability engineers (SREs) must know how to perform fault analysis on a system, classify defects, and monitor and report data. In this course, you'll explore the tools and best practices for carrying out these procedures. You'll begin by identifying various fault analysis methods and tools. You'll then classify software defects and bugs with a focus on severity and priority. Next, you'll investigate strategies for monitoring APIs and explore some tools used for this task. You'll then examine in detail several tools for collecting, analyzing, and reporting metric data using a customizable dashboard, including those that comprise the ELK Stack - Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Furthermore, you'll explore the data collection tool Beats and the beneficial use cases for Elasticsearch notifications.

Production Readiness Review (PRR), the standard first step of SRE engagement, and its phases are used to identify a service's reliability needs. The concept of ""early engagement"" is then used to evolve the Simple PRR model. In this course, you'll investigate SRE engagement, early engagement, and Production Readiness Review. You'll start by delving into each phase of the SRE Production Readiness Review (PRR) model, namely, engagement, analysis, refactoring, training, onboarding, and continuous improvement. Next, you'll learn how early engagement can be used to evolve the Simple PRR model. You'll then examine how SRE platforms and frameworks can provide structural solutions. Finally, you'll learn how to use the SRE engagement model to manage software projects, comparing it to the traditional System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) model.

The SRE engagement model and SRE service lifecycle have note-worthy similarities and differences to the traditional software development life cycle. In this course, you'll explore these differences and investigate the SRE engagement model's components and how to work with it in various circumstances. You'll learn the steps for setting up and building SRE service relationships and establishing a roadmap for sprints and communication. You'll examine how to measure the impact of SRE engagement, set ground rules for SRE teams, and sustain effective relationships with other SREs and developers. Next, you'll study the steps to take for scaling SRE to larger environments and for ending an engagement. Lastly, you'll review case studies to see the results of how others have used the SRE engagement model used in real-life.

Final Exam: Site Reliability Engineer will test your knowledge and application of the topics presented throughout the Site Reliability Engineer track of the Skillsoft Aspire Network Admin to Site Reliability Engineer Journey.