Testing
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) reframes reliability as a software problem. Instead of treating testing and monitoring as separate concerns, SRE treats them as integrated practices built around measurable objectives. This guide covers the core SRE testing practices: SLOs, error budgets, reliability testing, and how they work together. The SRE Testing
Testing
The worst time to learn your incident response process is during an actual incident. Game days, tabletop exercises, and runbook validation are how SRE teams build muscle memory before the real thing happens. This guide covers the full spectrum of incident response testing. Why Incident Response Needs Testing Incident response
Testing
A runbook that hasn't been used in a real incident is a hypothesis. You've documented a procedure, but you haven't proven it works under the conditions that matter — when the database is actually failing, the on-call engineer has been paged at 2am, and
Testing
Capacity planning is the practice of ensuring your infrastructure can handle future load before that load arrives. SRE teams use a combination of load testing, resource profiling, and traffic modeling to answer: "How much load can we handle, and when do we need to add more capacity?" The
On-Call Management
Squadcast is an incident management and on-call platform built specifically for SRE and DevOps teams. While tools like PagerDuty and OpsGenie target the broad enterprise market, Squadcast positions itself as the SRE-native alternative — tighter on core incident workflows, more opinionated on best practices, and significantly more affordable. For
SRE
Most teams write tests to verify features work. SRE teams write tests to verify that reliability commitments are met. The difference isn't philosophical — it produces a fundamentally different kind of test suite that catches a different class of failures. SLO-driven testing means your SLOs are the spec,
Testing
Most test strategies are organized around features: we test what we build. SLO-driven testing flips this: you test what you've promised. If you've committed to 99.9% availability, your test suite should have an explicit answer to the question "how do we know we&
Testing
Your SLI implementation is code. Your alerting rules are code. Your Prometheus recording rules are code. All of it can and should be tested — before it goes into production, before an incident shows you that your alert fires three hours too late or routes to the wrong Slack channel. This
SLA Testing
An SLA (Service Level Agreement) is only as valuable as your ability to verify it. Most engineering teams define SLAs, deploy to production, and then find out they're violating them from a customer complaint. That's not SLA management — that's reactive damage control. This guide
SRE
An error budget is the maximum amount of unreliability your SLO allows. For a 99.9% availability SLO over 30 days, your error budget is 0.1% of requests — about 43.8 minutes of total downtime. The error budget is only useful if you actually track it, enforce it, and
Testing
Multi-window burn rate alerting is the approach Google recommends in the SRE Workbook for SLO-based alerting. It avoids the problems with simple threshold alerting (too many false positives, or alerts that only fire hours into an incident). But it's also complex enough that bugs in the
SRE
Most SLO monitoring alerts on the wrong thing. "Alert when error rate exceeds 1%" fires when you're already failing — and misses slow degradation that doesn't cross a threshold for hours. Google's SRE book introduced a better approach: alert on burn rate, not