this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Programming

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As an SRE, what do I do about Alerts caused almost entirely by poor customer communication or misuse of a product? (tucson.social)
submitted 1 year ago by th3raid0r@tucson.social to c/programming@programming.dev
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A bit more context there since you might wonder why customers can cause Sev1's.

Well, I work for a Database Technology company and we provide a managed service offering. This managed service offering has SLA's that essentially enforce a 5 minute response time for any "urgent" issue.

Well, a common urgent issue is that the customer suddenly wants to load in a bunch of new data without informing us which causes the cluster to stop accepting write loads.

It's to the point where most if not all urgent pages result in some form of scaling of the cluster.

Since this is a customer driven behavior, there is no real ability to plan for it - and since these particular customers have special requirements (and thus, less ability to automate scaling operations), I'm unsure if there is any recourse here.

It's to the point that it doesn't even feel like an SRE team anymore - we should just instead be called "On-demand scaling agents". Since we're constantly trying to scale ahead of our customers.

All in all, I'm starting to feel like this is a management/sales level issue that I cannot possibly address. If we're selling this managed service offering as essentially "magic" that can be scaled whenever they need then it seems like we're being setup for failure at the organizational level. Not to mention, not being smart about costs behind scaling and factoring that into these contracts.

So, fellow SRE's have you had to have this conversation with a larger org? What works for something like this? What doesn't? Should I just seek greener pastures at this point?

P.S. - Posted c/Programming due to lack of a c/SRE

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[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 year ago

Definitely sounds like mostly a marketing/support/customer success engagement failure. Also sounds like someone in marketing wrote your SLAs, and that they need to be rewritten to something that’s based on actual data (specifically, the scale-up time of your cluster’s cloud provider + spin up time for whatever you’re running + some margin).