SRE Team Management: Operational Overload


Overview/Description
Expected Duration
Lesson Objectives
Course Number
Expertise Level



Overview/Description

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.



Expected Duration (hours)
0.9

Lesson Objectives

SRE Team Management: Operational Overload

  • discover the key concepts covered in this course
  • describe the term ops mode and differentiate between ops mode and nonlinear scaling
  • outline factors that contribute to team morale and stress such as financial and managerial impacts
  • list the details to include in an IT emergency plan
  • outline possible emergencies to plan for, such as undiagnosed alerts and knowledge gaps
  • describe how knowledge sharing can help teams plan for emergencies and recover from failures
  • recognize key factors of a high-quality postmortem
  • classify team emergencies into either 'toil' or 'not toil' categories
  • recognize the importance of service level objectives (SLOs) as they relate to a long-term SRE focus
  • describe steps to ensure a team-first approach to fixing overload issues
  • outline the importance of properly explaining findings and applying an appropriate level of detail for explanations
  • list key attributes of successful teams including purpose, trust, and awareness
  • differentiate between questioning techniques such as open/closed, funnel, probing, and leading
  • summarize the key concepts covered in this course
  • Course Number:
    it_sreinovdj_02_enus

    Expertise Level
    Intermediate