Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline originated at Google that applies software engineering principles to IT operations. SRE teams are responsible for the availability, latency, performance, efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response, and capacity planning of production services.
Key SRE concepts include SLOs and error budgets (defining and managing reliability targets), toil reduction (automating repetitive operational work), blameless postmortems (learning from failures without blame), and the 50% rule (SRE teams should spend at most 50% of time on operational work, with the rest on engineering projects that improve reliability).
SRE teams rely heavily on monitoring and alerting as the foundation of their practice. Comprehensive monitoring provides the SLI data needed to track SLO compliance, detect incidents quickly, and measure the impact of reliability improvements. Tools like Hyperping serve as a critical external monitoring layer that complements internal observability.