/devops-sre-ops

name: devops-sre-ops
description: Use when defining or reviewing reliability targets and operations practice - SLI/SLO/SLA and error budgets (and the error budget policy), multi-window multi-burn-rate alerts, incident response (roles, severity, mitigate first, handoff), on-call rotation and toil, blameless postmortems, change management and safe rollout (canary, freeze, rollback criteria decided in advance), runbooks, capacity planning, production readiness reviews, DORA metrics, maintenance windows and patch cadence, game days, and structured troubleshooting of an unknown outage. Not for metrics/logs/tracing tooling (devops-observability), backup/restore and DR mechanics (devops-storage-backup), pipeline implementation (devops-cicd), security incident response (fuse-security:security-expert) or FinOps.
versions:
  google-sre-book: "Site Reliability Engineering, O'Reilly 2016, web edition at sre.google/sre-book (page copyright 2017), read 2026-11-10"
  google-sre-workbook: "The Site Reliability Workbook, O'Reilly 2018, web edition at sre.google/workbook, read 2026-11-10"
  dora: "five-metric software delivery model; dora.dev guide updated 2026-01-05, history page updated 2026-01-02"
  prometheus-rules: "rule file syntax from prometheus.io docs (latest), read 2026-11-10; promtool not run (not installed on authoring host)"
  pagerduty-response-docs: "response.pagerduty.com severity levels and incident roles, read 2026-11-10"
  principles-of-chaos: "principlesofchaos.org, read 2026-11-10"
user-invocable: true
references:
  - references/slo-sli-error-budget.md
  - references/burn-rate-alerting.md
  - references/incident-response.md
  - references/on-call-toil.md
  - references/postmortem.md
  - references/change-rollout.md
  - references/runbooks.md
  - references/capacity-planning.md
  - references/production-readiness.md
  - references/dora-metrics.md
  - references/troubleshooting-method.md
  - references/game-days.md
  - references/templates/slo-definition.md
  - references/templates/error-budget-policy.md
  - references/templates/burn-rate-alerts.rules.yml
  - references/templates/incident-checklist.md
  - references/templates/postmortem.md
  - references/templates/runbook.md
  - references/templates/change-request-rollout-plan.md
  - references/templates/prr-checklist.md
  - references/templates/oncall-handoff.md
related-skills:
  - devops-observability
  - devops-storage-backup
  - devops-cicd
  - devops-kubernetes
  - devops-gitops-packaging
  - devops-proxmox
  - devops-linux
  - devops-secrets

<objective> Covers the reliability-engineering and day-2 operations method for an IT/DevOps agent: what to measure and promise (SLI, SLO, error budget and its policy), how to alert on it (multi-window multi-burn-rate), how to respond (incidents, on-call, troubleshooting), how to learn (postmortems, game days), how to change production safely (rollout, rollback criteria, freezes, maintenance windows), and how to prepare (runbooks, capacity, production readiness, toil, DORA). It is method, not tooling. Telemetry stacks belong to devops-observability; backup, restore and disaster recovery mechanics to devops-storage-backup; pipelines to devops-cicd; security incidents to fuse-security:security-expert. </objective>

DevOps SRE Operations

Agent Workflow (MANDATORY)

Before applying this method to a real system, spawn in parallel, one `Agent` call each with a `name`:

1. **fuse-ai-pilot:explore-codebase** - find existing SLO documents, alert rules, runbooks, postmortems, on-call and change records in the repo 2. **fuse-ai-pilot:research-expert** - verify any figure or tool option against the primary source (sre.google, dora.dev, prometheus.io) before relying on it 3. **mcp__context7__query-docs** - only where a library or tool is involved (Prometheus rule syntax, Alertmanager); the method itself has no library

Then read the live state read-only (current alerts, recent changes, budget remaining) before proposing anything. After writing files in a repo, run **fuse-ai-pilot:sniper**.

Sources and currency (checked 2026-11-10)

Method statements trace to the Google SRE Book and SRE Workbook (online editions), DORA (dora.dev), PagerDuty's public incident response documentation, Prometheus documentation and principlesofchaos.org. Each reference ends with the URLs read and a "Not verified" list: figures that are Google-scale (on-call staffing, response times) are labeled as such; defaults proposed by this skill (update cadence, patch cadence, toil log length) are labeled as the skill's own.

Overview

| Area | Decision in one line | |------|----------------------| | **SLO** | 100% is the wrong target; SLI = good events / total events; error budget = 1 - SLO; an SLO without a signed error budget policy has no teeth | | **Alerting** | Page on budget burn: 14.4x over 1 h and 5 min, 6x over 6 h and 30 min; ticket on 1x over 3 d and 6 h (99.9% SLO, 30 days); short window = 1/12 of the long one | | **Incidents** | Declare early; separate IC, ops, communications; mitigate before root cause; hand off command explicitly | | **On-call** | Pages are urgent and actionable; at most about 2 incidents per shift; sustainable rotation; handoff in writing | | **Postmortem** | Blameless, quantified impact, timeline in UTC, contributing factors, actions with type and one owner | | **Change** | Small, staged, canary first; rollback criteria written before the change; budget exhausted = freeze except P0 and security | | **Production actions** | Always ACTION / EFFECT / PROOF / WAIT-FOR-GO; the agent proposes, a human says go | | **Toil** | Keep below 50% of time; measure, then design away, automate or document | | **DORA** | Five metrics (lead time, deployment frequency, failed deployment recovery time, change fail rate, deployment rework rate); MTTR is the old name |

Critical Rules

1. **Measure before promising** - an SLO needs a defined SLI, a measurement point, an owner and a policy ([slo-sli-erro