The Role of SRE in Modern IT Operations: Key Responsibilities and Objectives

With the use of SRE, engineers or operations teams can automate tasks that were previously completed manually by operations teams in order to manage production systems and address faults.

Both IT operations and software development teams tremendously benefit from implementing an SRE team. Implementing SREs also helps in gauging the reliability of systems already in use, thus allowing the support and development teams to concentrate on researching and developing new features and services.

By now you must have understood what are SRE’s, but if you are unsure about the major objectives and responsibilities that SRE accomplishes in Modern IT Operations, this blog is for you. Come read along!

Objectives Of SRE

The primary objective of SRE teams is to act as a link between development teams and operations teams and ensure the system’s dependability and availability. The team makes it possible for the development team to focus on releasing new features and software while ensuring acceptable levels of error risk and IT operations performance as per the service level agreements(SLAs), that the organisation has with its clients.

It is common for systems to occasionally go for shutdown due to repairs and maintenance, but this affects the users and thoughts might arise in their minds whether the system is trustworthy or not. 

Here, you must be wondering about how to deal with this, because regular maintenance and updates are necessary to give one of a kind experience to the users. Well, that’s when SRE comes into the picture.
To fill the gap between these two, SRE seeks to automate the process of analysing and evaluating the consequences the change would have on the dependability of our system. SRE’s simplified process enables quick and secure releases, thus reducing the effects of errors. 

Key Responsibilities Of SRE

  1. Acting As An Assistance To Software ITOps, DevOps, & Support Teams

To help IT and support do their duties more effectively, SRE teams are in charge of proactively developing and delivering services. This involves everything from tweaks to production-level code modifications, as well as monitoring and alerting. A Site Reliability Engineer is responsible to create the custom tool from scratch if there are flaws in the software or incident management.

  1. Enhancing On-Call Procedures & Rotations

Site reliability engineers frequently look after on-call responsibilities. SRE teams work to enhance alerts with automation and context, enabling greater real-time teamwork from on-call responders. Site reliability engineers can also provide updates to runbooks, tools, and documentation to help on-call teams get ready for upcoming problems.

  1. Help Keep Record Of Important Information

SRE teams frequently get exposed to all technical teams as well as systems in both staging and production. As a result of their involvement in software development, support, IT operations, and on-call schedule management responsibilities, they develop a vast knowledge over time. By documenting this knowledge they can store a large piece of their expertise. Maintaining documentation and runbooks regularly can guarantee that teams have access to the information they require at the appropriate time.

  1. Post-Incident Reviews Can Be Carried Out

Without conducting rigorous post-incident interviews, it is hard to determine what is working and what’s not. SRE teams help maintain team integrity and make sure that everyone, including software developers and IT specialists, conducts post-incident evaluations, documents their findings, and acts on their lessons learned.

Final Thoughts

Teams working on software development and IT operations will both benefit substantially from implementing an SRE. Not only may SRE increase the stability of systems in production, but it can also likely reduce the amount of time IT, support, and development teams spend on support escalations, allowing them to devote more time to developing new features and services.

Zenduty’s provides a comprehensive platform for on-call management, incident alerting and response orchestration to infuse reliability in your operations.