The SRE Agent — Reliability Before the Incident
How Datarim's SRE agent defines SLOs, designs observability with the RED and USE methods, and shapes alerting so that pages are rare and meaningful.
Most reliability work happens too late. A service goes down, an alert fires, someone scrambles. The SRE agent is meant to shift that work earlier — to the design stage, where reliability decisions are cheap.
Its question is always the same: will this survive production? Not "does it work on a developer laptop" but "what happens when a dependency is slow, when traffic doubles, when one of three replicas disappears at 3 a.m."
Observability design
Observability is not the same as logging. Logging records events; observability lets an engineer ask arbitrary questions about system state without deploying new code. The SRE agent designs observability using two complementary frameworks.
The RED method covers services that handle requests: track Rate (requests per second), Errors (fraction that fail), and Duration (latency distribution). The USE method covers resources — CPUs, memory, disks, queues: track Utilization, Saturation, and Errors. Together they cover the two most common sources of production surprises. Structured logging and distributed tracing complete the picture by making individual request paths traceable across services.
SLOs and error budgets
An SLO — a Service Level Objective — is a target for how reliable a service needs to be. An error budget is what remains when the SLO is met: the margin for risky changes, experiments, and planned downtime. Without an error budget, reliability becomes a gut feeling rather than a number to reason about.
The SRE agent defines SLOs early in the design phase and uses them to shape alerting. The rule is simple: page on SLO burn rate, not on every anomaly. An alert that fires three times a week for things that resolve on their own is worse than no alert — it trains the team to ignore pages.
Where it sits
The SRE agent is active at /dr-design for reliability requirements, at /dr-qa for load and resilience review, and at /dr-archive Step 0.5 for postmortem analysis during reflection. Graceful degradation patterns — circuit breakers, retries with backoff, fallbacks — are part of its design vocabulary. Deployment safety techniques such as canary releases and feature flags fall within its scope when the plan calls for them.
See the full reference on the SRE agent card, or read what Datarim is for context on how agents fit together.