Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Training — SLOs, Observability & Incident Response

Who Should Attend

This program is for operations engineers, system administrators, and DevOps practitioners transitioning to SRE roles. If you’re on-call and tired of being paged for things that could have been prevented, this course teaches you how to build reliable systems systematically — not through heroics. Engineering managers implementing SRE functions will learn the organizational design, SLO framework, and error budget policies needed to make SRE work.

Learning Outcomes

• Define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) that matter to users
• Implement error budget policies that balance reliability with feature velocity
• Build a complete observability stack — metrics, logs, traces — with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo
• Design and execute chaos engineering experiments with defined blast radius and automated rollback
• Automate incident response — from detection through diagnosis, mitigation, and post-incident review
• Implement capacity planning and auto-scaling based on SLO-driven demand forecasting
• Reduce toil through runbook automation and self-healing infrastructure

Course Modules

1. SRE Fundamentals — History, principles, SRE vs. DevOps vs. Platform Engineering. Google SRE book applied to your organization.
2. SLOs, SLIs & Error Budgets — Choosing the right indicators. Defining objectives. Error budget calculation. Budget-based decision making.
3. Observability — Metrics — Prometheus architecture. Instrumentation. PromQL. Recording rules. Alertmanager. Federation.
4. Observability — Logs & Traces — Loki, Tempo, OpenTelemetry. Structured logging. Distributed tracing. Correlation.
5. Alerting Design — Alerting on symptoms, not causes. Alert fatigue reduction. Escalation policies. On-call rotation design.
6. Incident Management — Incident roles (IC, OL, CL). Incident lifecycle. Communication templates. Stakeholder management.
7. Post-Incident Review — Blameless postmortems. Action item tracking. Incident metrics (MTTD, MTTR, MTTF). Continuous improvement.
8. Chaos Engineering — Principles. Experiment design. Blast radius. Gremlin/Chaos Mesh. Game days.
9. Runbook Automation — Toil identification. Rundeck/Ansible automation. Self-healing patterns. Automated diagnostics.
10. Capacity Planning — Demand forecasting. Horizontal and vertical scaling. Cost-aware capacity. Auto-scaling policies.
11. SRE Organization Design — Team structures. Engagement models. SRE adoption patterns. Measuring SRE team effectiveness.
12. Capstone: Reliable Service Design — Design SLOs, observability, alerting, incident response, and chaos experiments for a production service.

Hands-on Labs (24 total)

Labs include: “Define SLOs and error budgets for a sample e-commerce service,” “Build a Grafana dashboard correlating latency, error rate, and traffic,” “Execute a chaos experiment that kills 50% of pods and verify that the service meets its SLO,” “Write an automated runbook that diagnoses and restarts a failed service.”

Real-World Projects

• Project 1: Define a complete SLO/SLI framework for a multi-service application
• Project 2: Build an observability stack with automated alerting based on SLO burn rate
• Project 3: Design and execute a chaos engineering game day with post-incident review

Corporate Training Option

We adapt the curriculum to your production environment. Your services become the case studies. Your on-call rotations become the basis for incident management exercises. Contact us for a tailored SRE transformation program.

Online / Classroom Options

• Online: Live sessions 2×/week, 8 weeks. 24×7 lab access with production-simulated environments.
• Corporate: On-site or virtual. Customized to your observability stack and incident tooling.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is SRE only for Google-scale companies? No. SRE principles apply to any organization that cares about reliability — from startups with 2 services to enterprises with 2,000. The tools and scale differ, but SLOs, error budgets, and blameless postmortems work at every size.

How is SRE different from DevOps? DevOps focuses on the delivery lifecycle (plan → code → build → test → deploy). SRE focuses on operating services reliably using software engineering. They’re complementary — SRE is a specific implementation of DevOps principles for production operations.