site-reliability-engineering

name	site-reliability-engineering
description	Use when designing, operating, reviewing, or improving production reliability with SLOs, incident command, observability, error budgets, and operational excellence.
title	Site Reliability Engineering — Methodology
type	skill
subjects	["SRE","Reliability Engineering","Incident Management","Observability","Platform Engineering"]

Site Reliability Engineering

A comprehensive methodology for designing, operating, and improving reliable production systems. Rooted in Google SRE principles and extended with modern practices for incident command, observability engineering, error budget governance, and operational excellence.

When to Load This Skill

Trigger	What It Means
"Design reliability into this system"	SLO/SLI framework, error budget policy, resilience architecture
"Run an incident postmortem"	Blameless postmortem with timeline, 5 Whys, action tracking
"Improve our on-call"	Rotation design, alert tuning, toil reduction, escalation policy
"Build observability"	The Four Golden Signals, dashboard design, alert rule patterns
"Do a reliability review"	Architecture review against SRE principles, risk assessment
"I need an incident commander"	Incident command framework, role cards, communication templates
"Automate this operational task"	Toil assessment, automation decision tree, runbook pattern

Loading Order

1. skill_view('site-reliability-engineering') — this file, methodology index
2. Load references on demand by topic (see below)

Reference Files

Topic	File	When to Load
SRE Book Chapter Summaries	references/sre-book-chapters.md	Design engagement, first principles review
SLO/SLI Framework	references/slo-sli-framework.md	Defining reliability targets
Error Budget Governance	references/error-budget-governance.md	Policy design, burn rate alerts
Incident Command System	references/incident-command-system.md	During/after incident, training
Blameless Postmortems	references/postmortem-culture.md	After incident, process design
Monitoring & Alerting	references/monitoring-alerting.md	Observability design, alert rules
On-Call Best Practices	references/oncall-best-practices.md	Rotation design, team sizing
Toil Elimination	references/toil-elimination.md	Automation prioritization, ops review
Release Engineering	references/release-engineering.md	Deployment pipeline design
Effective Troubleshooting	references/troubleshooting.md	Debugging methodology
Senior SRE Role Blueprint	references/senior-sre-blueprint.md	Role definition, KPI framework
SRE Communication Guide	references/sre-communication-guide.md	Stakeholder updates, incident communication
Guiding Principles	references/guiding-principles.md	First principles, philosophy
Product-Focused Reliability	references/product-focused-reliability.md	Product-centric SRE, CUJ-based SLOs, JTBD model
Twenty Years of Lessons	references/twenty-years-lessons.md	Incident-derived tactical lessons, Prodverbs
SRE Ecosystem Guide	references/sre-ecosystem-guide.md

Templates

Template	File	Purpose
Incident Commander Checklist	templates/incident-command-checklist.md	Step-by-step IC response
Postmortem Template	templates/postmortem-template.md	Blameless postmortem document
Runbook Template	templates/runbook-template.md	Operational runbook standard
SLO Declaration Template	templates/slo-declaration-template.md	Service-level objective specification
Error Budget Policy	templates/error-budget-policy.md	Team-level error budget governance
On-Call Rotation Template	templates/oncall-rotation.md	Rotation schedule and escalation
Service Review Checklist	templates/service-review-checklist.md	Pre-launch reliability review
Incident Communication Template	templates/incident-communication.md	Status updates during incidents

Scripts

Script	Purpose
scripts/slo-burn-rate.py	Calculate error budget burn rate from SLI data
scripts/postmortem-summary.py	Generate a postmortem summary from structured data

Output Contract

All output follows the artifact pyramid convention (three-layer progressive disclosure). The response to any caller is the absolute path to 00-index.md. Not a summary. Not a conversation. A path.

Related Profiles

This skill is primarily used by the site-reliability-engineer profile. It works alongside:

• technical-architect — receives reliability constraints, provides architecture context
• data-architect — coordinates on observability pipeline and data durability
• orchestrator — routes incident response tasks and reliability initiatives
• implementation-planner — consumes reliability requirements for build plans