Today’s dynamic business ecosystem is anchored firmly on software services. Unplanned errors, prolonged slowdowns, and outages can cripple business operations, emphasizing the significance of SRE effective incident management. However, addressing such incidents is seldom a straightforward task.
With the increased use of distributed microservice architectures, the SRE incident response becomes more complex, albeit their flexibility in adapting to changing business requirements. To mitigate this complexity, an intelligent, new breed of automated response tools is transforming the incident resolution process by minimizing manual interventions and repetitive tasks.
Barriers to SRE incident response
Barrier 1: Data overload
A critical aspect of Site Reliability Engineers’ (SREs) work is the need for pertinent data and insightful service performance metrics to diagnose and resolve incidents. However, a typical microservice tends to generate a myriad of data, ranging from logs in Elasticsearch to application performance monitoring (APM) data, creating an overwhelming data landscape for SREs.
Therefore, there’s an increasing need for systems that can efficiently ingest, monitor, trace, and correlate performance data. These systems provide a comprehensive view of root causes, thereby optimizing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).
Barrier 2: Application complexity
While microservices have streamlined debugging issues related to individual services, their interdependence tends to increase the overall application complexity. Every point of interaction between microservices represents a potential point of failure. This heightened complexity can misdirect the incident response, wasting valuable time. Thus, an automated system that can highlight all services impacted by an incident can significantly expedite problem diagnosis.
Barrier 3: Collaboration hurdles
SREs are rarely solo operators. Handling significant incidents often requires multiple responders and business stakeholders. However, traditional communication approaches can be time-consuming, distracting from the core task – resolving the incident. Automated systems that facilitate streamlined communication and coordination among the response team can therefore be invaluable.
Barrier 4: Post-incident pain points
The responsibility of SREs doesn’t end with resolving the incident. It also involves a meticulous postmortem to prevent future occurrences. Unfortunately, manually gathering data for the postmortem is a time-consuming task that offers little value. Automation in this area can focus on more crucial aspects, such as incident impact assessment, analysis of the incident, and devising action plans for incident prevention.
Conquering incident response with automation
In-depth data analysis:
The perennial concern for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) is the unwanted inundation of overlapping alerts, which invariably leads to alert fatigue. This tiresome state is counterproductive to their efficiency.
However, with the advent of incident response automation platforms, this scenario has dramatically changed. These platforms act as an essential interface with a plethora of observability tools monitoring a majority of our services, hence alleviating data overload.
The result is a centralized hub for all alerts. When anomalies surface, these are brought to our attention through a solitary notification. This streamlined approach even extends to mobile devices, allowing SREs to acknowledge alerts on-the-go. However, for a comprehensive investigation of the incident, a switch to a desktop environment might be more suitable.
From this platform, we can access critical data points such as the data source that triggered the alert, the specific service it pertains to, and the nature of the problem. This in-depth exploration allows us to delve into each data source, thereby illuminating the issues with the service that set off the alert.
Automation aids in encapsulating the actual problem instantaneously upon receipt of the notification. This swift response keeps downtime to a minimum, enhancing overall service reliability.
Simplifying complexity
The task of managing an incident falls on the shoulders of SREs, necessitating a full understanding of the problem’s extent. Each service participating in an incident has a chain of dependent upstream and downstream services.
Resolving the incident at hand depends on comprehending its complete range. This is where automation tools act as a guiding light, providing a bird’s eye view of the other services our incident is influencing.
There are situations where an upstream service (upon which our service depends) might be causing our incident. In such instances, the protocol involves verifying that the team responsible for the upstream service is working towards a solution.
We then enter a phase of patient anticipation, waiting for the upstream incident team to rectify the issue. Once the upstream service is functioning correctly, we can closely monitor our service to ensure a seamless recovery.
Regardless of the incident’s underlying cause, having automated access to an overarching view of the incident’s extent ensures a minimization of the incident resolution time. This approach eliminates the risk of overreacting or underreacting.
Facilitating collaboration
Incidents are often significant, with substantial business impact, necessitating the immediate summoning of an incident response team. Manual assembly of such a team is far from ideal, as at the very least, a developer conversant with the service in question is required.
In addition, someone capable of handling communications with business stakeholders is indispensable. Automated on-call management systems ease this process by swiftly identifying who is on-call to respond to an incident with the impacted service.
These systems can then alert all team members using the most effective communication means available. Robust incident response automation tools can manage these notifications, thereby freeing up our time to focus on reducing the incident resolution time.
Just like any other process that we automate, communication automation facilitates a faster incident resolution by eliminating the wasted time spent on administrative tasks.
Seamless postmortems
An ideal incident timeline platform automatically compiles timeline data. This automated process saves time, enabling us to concentrate on the most critical aspects of a postmortem.
Moreover, automation helps us adhere to a fundamental principle of good SRE practice – blameless postmortems. While it’s straightforward to sidestep overtly biased postmortems blaming individuals for outages, it’s considerably harder to avoid subtler biases such as confirmation bias. This bias makes us more inclined to notice data that bolsters our preconceived notions about the incident’s root causes, and less observant of data that contradicts our hypothesis.
Our collective experience indicates that incident management is not a straightforward task – and we’ve embraced that reality. As SREs, we take immense pride in our work to keep apps and services running smoothly. Despite the inherent complexities in incident management, we’ve observed several parts of the incident resolution process where SREs can unnecessarily expend energy on toil, detracting from their focus on problem-solving.
However, the situation needn’t be this complicated! Automation – particularly the advanced automation available through solutions such as Lightstep Incident Response – allows us to bypass low-value tasks. This paves the way for us to apply our skills and time to resolving incidents as expediently as possible.
