SRE on Simple Enough Blog

MTTR: The Metric That Saves Your Nights

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 10:00:00 +0200

It’s three in the morning, an alert fires, and the only question that matters isn’t “why did it break?” but “how long until it’s fixed?”. Trying to prevent every outage is an illusion: complex systems always end up failing. The real measure of a team’s maturity isn’t its ability to never fail, but its ability to recover fast. That’s what MTTR measures — provided you know how to read it.

The Setups That Make Knowledge Circulate: Rotation, Game Days and Guilds

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:00:00 +0200

In the guide to collaboration modes, we saw how to pass knowledge on in real time (the tacit) and in writing (the explicit). But a team can master all these practices and still watch its knowledge concentrate in a few people. The reason is structural: without a setup that forces it, knowledge follows the natural slope of specialization. This article deals with the organizational layer — not how we work together, but how we arrange things so that knowledge circulates by default.

Everyday Chaos Engineering: Learning to Love the Wave

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0100

We all dream of a stable, predictable, “calm” system. And yet, the reality of a modern platform is a living sea: deployments, external dependencies, cloud quotas, flaky networks, traffic spikes, human error—and sometimes… just “something” that should never have happened.

Chaos engineering is often presented as a spectacular discipline—“we cut an AWS zone,” “we kill a cluster,” “we take Kafka down.” In real life (and especially in small teams), that’s neither necessary nor desirable at the beginning.

Consumer-Reported Dependency Health

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 11:18:06 +0200

I. Rethinking How We Evaluate the Health of Distributed Systems

In modern distributed architectures, a system’s health depends as much — if not more — on the state of its dependencies as on its own internal state. Yet most monitoring strategies still rely on synthetic or dedicated healthchecks: /health endpoints, liveness/readiness probes, external scripts, and similar mechanisms.