Solutions for Site Reliability Engineers

OBJECTIVE

Needs of a Site Reliability Engineer

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that incorporates aspects of software engineering (development) and applies them to infrastructure and operations problems. The main goals are to create scalable and highly reliable software systems and as such they split their time between operations (on-call duties) and developing systems and software that improve site reliability and performance. One might say, the goal for SRE’s is to “automate their way out a job.

Note: Although there are no hard & fast rules, SRE is typically more core infrastructure and production centric, unlike its DevOps cousin that tends to be more focused on DevTest environments and product delivery.

SOLUTION

To address the needs of Site Reliability Engineering there is a need to establish a framework that allows all Site Reliability Engineers to have architectural insight and implement methods to monitor, measure and operationally improve platform and site reliability.

The enov8 platform is an “Enterprise IT Intelligence” solution that sits holistically across your IT landscape (production & test environments) and allows you to model your site, monitor your site, define site operations, automate site operations and capture metrics & trends that support Site Reliability objectives.

Task

How enov8 can help

Understanding your core architecture and Infrastructure

Enov8 has a Visual CMDB that provides detailed & real-time mapping of all your IT and Business elements and relationships.

Ensuring key operations are documented, reliable and streamlined

Enov8 ensures your SRE operations are captured, standardized and shared using runbooks and streamlined through integration with your favourite DevOps tools.

Site Monitoring & Trending e.g. reliability & performance metrics

Use Enov8 to monitor and report on your Configuration Items health, capacity & performance. Employ Enov8 agents, test synthetics and other integrated tools to provide intelligence & trigger alerts.

Providing Service & Change Management to track & control events

Enov8 gives you a choice of integrating with your enterprise support solution and/or using our “out of the box” environment calendars & lean service management capability (including change, release & incident requests).

Implementing Reliable Release (deployment) Processes

Use Enov8 Enterprise Release Manager to effectively collaborate, plan & coordinate releases, automate provisioning and track deployment & version information.

Streamlining manual operations through codification

Enov8 not only helps you document your runsheets, it has an advanced (& code agnostic) DevOps library where you can add (& schedule) scripts to replace existing manual tasks.

Continually improve

Use the enov8 platform to capture and analyse all the relevant information & metrics relevant to your SRE operations. Analyse it from different perspectives e.g. By Business Units, Platform, Technology etc & identify ways to improve.

How Enov8 Can Help

IT due diligence

Understanding your IT landscape is necessary before you embark on transformational activities. Enov8 has advanced knowledge management & cross-platform (e.g. CMDB, DevOps, eAM, ITSM & PPM) integration feature that provide detailed mappings of all key business & IT elements and promotes effective decision making, change prioritisation and ultimately solution sizing.

Define future state of transformed landscape

Use Enov8 to design blueprints of what the future organization environments and applications will look like. And compare with historical, existing or future footprints.

Transformational / migration planning

For large transformational engagements, like cloud migrations, it is necessary to have effective planning, coordination & orchestration management methods. Use enov8 to scope the overarching transformation portfolio, divide and conquer with Transformational Release Sprints, direct key operations and track holistic & granular activity.

Define Implementation Operations

Leverage enov8 implementation runbooks to define and direct transformational / migration operations down to atomic steps and track progress.

Transformation Testing / Quality Assurance

Ensure completed activities / migrations are effectively tested by using enov8 “health-check” runbooks and out-of-the box lean synthetics (system test automation).

Transformation / Migration status accounting and reporting

Use the enov8 platform to capture and analyse all the relevant information & metrics relevant to your transformation / migration. Analyse the details from different perspectives e.g. Portfolios, Releases (Sprints), Systems, Teams and share that information with team members and stakeholders.