In order for a site reliability engineer to do their job well, they need visibility into all of their organization’s services. With Cortex, SREs have not only this visibility, but a suite of tools that facilitate their demanding responsibilities. When SREs are paged about an incident, they can quickly access runbooks, dashboards, and other crucial information, so they can easily mitigate an issue before it escalates.
Incident management
SREs are often the first line of defense, and as a result, they need a central source of information about all of their organization’s services. With Cortex, SREs can navigate to a specific service’s details page to access its runbooks and event timeline. Plus, oncall information is readily accessible, and SREs can trigger an incident directly within Cortex to automatically notify all the responsible parties. With this visibility, SREs no longer need to dig around the codebase or disparate knowledge bases (KBs) searching for relevant information.
Automating SRE readiness checklists
With Cortex’s Scorecards, SREs can automate their readiness checklists and determine at a glance whether a particular service is ready for the SRE team. For example, the SRE team may decide that a service must have runbooks, API documentation, and an established on-call rotation before being released in production.
With SRE readiness Scorecards in place, SRE teams don’t need to verify whether a service is ready — the Scorecard will indicate that. They can set a score threshold, or use Ladders to establish baselines and indicate at which Level the SRE team will accept a service.
Reliability initiatives
SREs can also set maturity standards and drive progress across teams by setting up a Scorecard to manage services after deployment. This allows SRE teams to clearly communicate priorities and codify standards across the organization. Plus, this allows SREs to celebrate the teams that are achieving or surpassing standards.
Amplify SRE reach
SRE teams tend to be smaller than engineering teams, but Cortex can easily help SREs drive progress across the whole organization. Through Scorecards, Initiatives, notifications, and nudges, developers can immediately see what standards need to be met and what’s important to the organization, which will increase impact and engagement in turn.
Insightful audits
Cortex features a number of tools that allow SREs to gain detailed insight about particular services. The Query Builder allows SRE teams to conduct an ad-hoc audit of services based on all of the information that exists within the Catalog. In seconds, SREs can generate a complete list of all services that aren’t in compliance.
The Discovery Audit automatically pulls in every change that Cortex detects across all of your environments, allowing SRE teams to quickly confirm that the Service Catalog and Resource Catalog are up to date. SREs can confidently maintain their handle on new releases and keep an accountable view of the organization’s world as services, repos, and resources are added or removed.
Demo Cortex today
Cortex is a single pane of glass for SREs, providing the level of visibility they need. From the Service Catalog to the Query Builder, Cortex offers powerful insights so SREs can ensure standards are being met across the organization. To see how Cortex can empower SREs at your organization, book a demo today.
