Site Reliability Engineering

A comprehensive methodology for designing, operating, and improving reliable production systems. Rooted in Google SRE principles and extended with modern practices for incident command, observability engineering, error budget governance, and operational excellence.

When to Load This Skill

Trigger	What It Means
"Design reliability into this system"	SLO/SLI framework, error budget policy, resilience architecture
"Run an incident postmortem"	Blameless postmortem with timeline, 5 Whys, action tracking
"Improve our on-call"	Rotation design, alert tuning, toil reduction, escalation policy
"Build observability"	The Four Golden Signals, dashboard design, alert rule patterns
"Do a reliability review"	Architecture review against SRE principles, risk assessment
"I need an incident commander"	Incident command framework, role cards, communication templates
"Automate this operational task"	Toil assessment, automation decision tree, runbook pattern
"Adopt SRE in this organization"	Engagement boundaries, maturity, team model, and change adoption
"Review this reliability design"	User journeys, dependencies, overload, configuration, canary, durability
"Our SRE team is overloaded"	Operational-load diagnosis, protected engineering time, recovery plan
"Improve incident learning or sustainable on-call"	Cognitive load, psychological safety, documentation, exercises

When not to use

Use release-engineering to plan releases, compose promotion and rollback gates, or coordinate a release train. Use systematic-debugging to find the cause of a specific failure. Operating the telemetry stack itself — Prometheus scrape configs, OpenTelemetry Collector pipelines, Loki ingest and retention, Prometheus rules files — belongs to telemetry; this skill owns the SLI/SLO and alert design those rules implement. Grafana product work — dashboards, panels, Grafana-side alert rules, contact points, notification policies — belongs to grafana.

Operational closure gate

For any automated mitigation, rollback, recovery action, or incident closeout:

1. Bound the action before it starts. Record the target, affected population, maximum blast radius, success criterion, abort/rollback criteria, rollback target and procedure, and who may stop or reverse it. Prefer the smallest reversible scope and staged expansion.
2. Verify recovery at the user boundary. After the action, follow the R-01 closure evidence sequence: check the user-facing SLOs, critical user journey, relevant dependency health, and data/state correctness. Observe a defined stability window and check secondary effects such as backlog recovery.
3. Do not equate alert resolution with recovery. A cleared alert or passing health endpoint is evidence, not a resolution verdict. If required evidence is missing, retain the MITIGATING or MONITORING state, name the unverified boundary, and escalate rather than declare RESOLVED.
4. Record the evidence. Capture the action, scope, thresholds, observed recovery evidence, remaining uncertainty, and rollback/follow-up trigger in the incident or change record.

"Pre-authorized" means a human service owner, incident commander, or other designated change authority has explicitly approved the specific action and scope in the current incident or change record, with an approval action or confirmation independently attributable to that human. A request to investigate or diagnose, an approved standing policy/runbook without current human confirmation, an agent-authored note or self-claimed role, or the agent's own judgment is not production-mutation authorization. Automation may execute only after that authorization is verified and the action is bounded. It must stop and hand off when authorization, blast radius, rollback path, or recovery evidence cannot be established.

Reference Files

Topic	File	When to Load
SRE Book Chapter Summaries	references/sre-book-chapters.md	Design engagement, first principles review
SLO/SLI Framework	references/slo-sli-framework.md	Defining reliability targets
SLO Implementation Recipe	references/slo-implementation-recipe.md	Agent-executable SLO adoption sequence and stakeholder review
Error Budget Governance	templates/error-budget-policy.md and references/slo-sli-framework.md	Policy design, burn rate alerts
Incident Command System	references/incident-command-system.md	During/after incident, training
Blameless Postmortems	references/postmortem-culture.md	After incident, process design
Monitoring & Alerting	references/monitoring-alerting.md	Observability design, alert rules
On-Call Best Practices	references/oncall-best-practices.md	Rotation design, team sizing
Toil Elimination	references/toil-elimination.md	Automation prioritization, ops review
Release Engineering	release-engineering	Release planning, promotion, progressive delivery, and rollback design; use the local reference only for SRE-specific integration context
Effective Troubleshooting	references/troubleshooting.md	Debugging methodology
Senior SRE Role Blueprint	references/senior-sre-blueprint.md	Role definition, KPI framework
SRE Communication Guide	references/sre-communication-guide.md	Stakeholder updates, incident communication
Guiding Principles	references/guiding-principles.md	First principles, philosophy
Product-Focused Reliability	references/product-focused-reliability.md	Product-centric SRE, CUJ-based SLOs, JTBD model
Twenty Years of Lessons	references/twenty-years-lessons.md	Incident-derived tactical lessons, Prodverbs
SRE Ecosystem Guide	references/sre-ecosystem-guide.md	Curated guide to all SRE resources (Workbook, Secure Systems, Classroom, Prodcast, STPA, Video Gallery, Mobaa, fundamentals, AI ops)
Adoption and Engagement	references/sre-adoption-and-engagement.md	Starting SRE, dedicated and non-dedicated team models, maturity, change adoption
Reliability Design and Change	references/reliability-design-and-change.md	Capacity, overload, configuration, canaries, data durability, dependencies, design review
Human Systems and Learning	references/human-systems-and-learning.md	Cognitive work, sustainable on-call, psychological safety, documentation, exercises
Third-Party Dependency Reliability	references/third-party-dependency-reliability.md	Vendor boundaries, failure modes, fallbacks, and provider evidence
Operational Documentation	references/operational-documentation.md	Functional quality, ownership, testing, and staleness lifecycle

Templates

Template	File	Purpose
Incident Commander Checklist	templates/incident-command-checklist.md	Step-by-step IC response
Postmortem Template	templates/postmortem-template.md	Blameless postmortem document
Runbook Template	templates/runbook-template.md	Operational runbook standard
SLO Declaration Template	templates/slo-declaration-template.md	Service-level objective specification
Error Budget Policy	templates/error-budget-policy.md	Team-level error budget governance
On-Call Rotation Template	templates/oncall-rotation.md	Rotation schedule and escalation
Service Review Checklist	templates/service-review-checklist.md	Pre-launch reliability review
Incident Communication Template	templates/incident-communication.md	Status updates during incidents
Reliability Design Review	templates/reliability-design-review.md	Evidence-based review of user impact, failure modes, capacity, change, and operations
Operational Overload Recovery	templates/operational-overload-recovery.md	Declare, protect, reduce, and verify recovery from unsustainable operational load
Reliability Ownership Charter	templates/reliability-ownership-charter.md	Make service, pager, dependency, and engagement boundaries explicit

Scripts

Script	Purpose
scripts/slo-burn-rate.py	Calculate error budget burn rate from SLI data

Portability

This skill is intentionally host-neutral. Use your agent's normal mechanisms to load the references, templates, and scripts listed here. Do not assume a particular profile system, task orchestrator, memory service, or response-handoff format.