When Things Break: SRE Incident Management and On-Call Best Practices
As Christmas approaches, the last thing anyone wants is a system outage during peak usage. For Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), incident management is a core part of ensuring smooth operations, even when the unexpected happens. With only 6 days left until Christmas, we’re unwrapping another crucial SRE concept: incident management and on-call best practices.
Whether it’s a sudden spike in traffic, a misconfigured deployment, or a catastrophic failure, incidents are inevitable. The difference between a minor disruption and a major disaster often comes down to preparation and response. In this article, we’ll cover what happens during an incident, how SREs respond, and best practices for creating effective incident playbooks, managing on-call duties, and turning incidents into learning opportunities.
1. What Happens During an Incident and How Do SREs Respond?
An “incident” is any unplanned event that disrupts normal service operation. Incidents range from small performance issues to large-scale outages. When an incident occurs, speed and coordination are essential.
Stages of Incident Response
- Detection: The incident is detected through monitoring, alerting systems, or user reports.
- Triage: The on-call SRE assesses the impact, determines severity, and prioritizes the response.
- Escalation: If the incident is complex, additional team members or specialists are called in.
- Mitigation: Temporary solutions (like failovers or feature toggles) are applied to reduce user impact.
- Resolution: The root cause is identified and resolved to fully restore service.
- Post-Incident Review: The team analyzes what went wrong and identifies ways to prevent recurrence.
How SREs Respond to Incidents
- Stay Calm: SREs are trained to stay composed, focus on impact, and avoid making rushed decisions.
- Use Playbooks: Pre-written playbooks guide SREs through known issues with step-by-step instructions.
- Communicate Clearly: Internal teams and external users need timely updates on the status of the incident.
2. Creating Effective Incident Playbooks
An incident playbook is a pre-defined set of steps that guide SREs during an incident. Playbooks help SREs avoid guesswork, reduce response times, and ensure consistent actions.
What to Include in a Playbook
- Title & Description: What type of incident is this playbook for? (e.g., “Database Latency Spike Playbook”)
- Symptoms: How will this issue appear in monitoring or logs? (e.g., “API response times exceed 500ms”)
- Impact Assessment: Who or what is affected by this incident? (e.g., “Customers may see delayed responses.”)
- Mitigation Steps: Step-by-step instructions for immediate action. (e.g., “Restart the database replica and monitor metrics.”)
- Escalation Path: Who to call if the issue cannot be resolved alone.
- Resolution Steps: How to bring the system back to normal.
- Post-Incident Notes: A reminder to document the root cause and any follow-up actions.
How to Build a Playbook
- Start with Frequent Incidents: Build playbooks for issues that occur regularly.
- Involve the Team: Collaborate with engineers who have experience resolving the incident type.
- Test the Playbook: Run drills to ensure the playbook is clear, complete, and effective.
- Review and Update: As systems evolve, so should your playbooks.
3. On-Call Culture and Strategies to Avoid Burnout
Being on-call can be stressful. If not managed well, it leads to burnout, frustration, and high turnover. Building a positive on-call culture is critical to long-term team health.
Best Practices for On-Call Culture
- Fair Rotations: Ensure on-call shifts are fairly distributed, and team members have time to recover.
- Limit Toil: Reduce the number of false alarms and automate responses to common alerts.
- Set Alert Thresholds: Tune alert thresholds to avoid “alert fatigue” where too many notifications lead to missed critical alerts.
- On-Call Support: Ensure there’s always someone to escalate to if the on-call engineer can’t resolve the issue.
- Debrief After On-Call Shifts: Offer time for feedback after a shift to improve processes and tools.
How to Avoid Burnout
- Use Error Budgets: Error budgets prevent overworking SREs. If the system is already unreliable, freeze new feature deployments.
- Offer “Quiet Hours”: If possible, allow SREs time to recover after a rough on-call shift.
- Enable “Pager Duty Off”: Allow engineers to temporarily opt out of on-call rotations when needed for personal well-being.
On-call doesn’t have to be a nightmare. With thoughtful planning and support, SREs can have a healthier, less stressful experience.
4. Post-Incident Reviews (PIRs) and Turning Incidents into Learning Opportunities
Once an incident is resolved, the work isn’t over. A post-incident review (PIR) is where the real value of SRE work emerges. PIRs turn mistakes into improvements and help prevent future failures.
Key Elements of a Post-Incident Review (PIR)
- Timeline of Events: What happened, when, and in what order?
- Root Cause Analysis: What was the underlying issue, and why did it happen?
- Impact Analysis: How did this incident affect users, systems, and the business?
- What Went Well: Celebrate the things that worked. (e.g., “The failover system activated automatically.”)
- What Could Be Improved: Identify what didn’t work as expected. (e.g., “The alert didn’t trigger early enough.”)
- Action Items: Assign owners to specific follow-ups to ensure improvements are made.
Blameless Post-Incident Reviews
Blame doesn’t solve problems. The goal of a PIR is to understand what happened, not to punish people. Blameless PIRs focus on systems and processes, not individuals. This encourages engineers to be honest and open about mistakes, which leads to better outcomes.
How to Turn Incidents Into Learning Opportunities
- Document Every Incident: Every outage or failure is a chance to learn.
- Share Knowledge: Write up learnings as internal wikis or team updates.
- Automate Lessons Learned: If a human error led to an outage, automate the task to avoid repeat mistakes.
Conclusion: Turning Chaos into Control
Incidents are inevitable, but with proper incident management, effective playbooks, and a healthy on-call culture, SREs can reduce the impact of these disruptions. More importantly, every incident offers a chance to learn and improve.
With only 6 days left until Christmas, now is the perfect time to reflect on how your team handles incidents. Are your playbooks up to date? Is your on-call schedule fair and humane? Have you conducted post-incident reviews for this year’s biggest outages?
Use these remaining days to give your team the “gift of reliability” by improving your incident response processes. Tomorrow, we’ll focus on a new topic: Chaos Engineering and How to Break Things Before They Break You. Stay tuned for more SRE fundamentals, and may your holiday season be calm, bright, and incident-free!