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Is it possible to "manage up" on customer expectations? Or am I doomed to unreasonable SLAs? (Database as a Service Company) (self.ask_experienced_devs)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by th3raid0r to c/ask_experienced_devs
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I'm just so exhausted these days. We have formal SLA's, but its not like they're ever followed. After all, Customer X needs to be notified within 5 minutes of any anomalous events in their cluster, and Customer Y is our biggest customer, so we give them the white glove treatment.

Yadda yadda, bla bla. So on and so forth, almost every customer has some exception/difference in SLAs.

I was hired on to be an SRE, but I'm just a professional dashboard starer at this point. The amount of times I've been alerted in the middle of the night because CPU was running high for 5 minutes is too damn high. Just so I can apologize to Mr. Customer that they maybe had a teensy slowdown during that time.

If I try to get us back to fundamentals and suggest we should only alert on impact, not short lived anomalies, there is some surface level agreement, but everyone seems to think "well we might miss something, so we need to keep it".

It's like we're trying to prevent outages by monitoring for potential issues rather than actually making our system more robust and automate-able.

How do I convince these people that this isn't sustainable? That trying to "catch" incidents before they happen is a fools errand. It's like that chart about the "war on drugs" where it shows exponential expense growth as you try to prevent ALL drug usage (which is impossible). Yet this tech company seems to think we should be trying to prevent all outages with excessive monitoring.

And that doesn't even get into the bonkers agreements we make with customers to agree to do a deep dive research on why 2 different environments have a response time that differs by 1ms.

Or the agreements that force us to complete customer provided training - while not assessing how much training we already committed to. It's entirely normal to do 3-4x HIPAA / PCI / Compliance trainings when everyone else in the org only has to do one set of those.

I'm at a point where I'm considering moving on. This job just isn't sustainable and there's no interest in the org to make it sustainable.

But perhaps one of y'all managed to fix something similar in their org with a few key conversations and some effort? What other things could I try as a sort of final "Hail Mary" before looking to greener pastures?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I've never been an SRE nor had to deal with super demanding giant corporate customers, but that seems exceptionally insane.

Serious suggestion: would the terms of your SLA allow you automate those emails to customers? Then you'd only have to actually deal with replies from customers. (Who I assume aren't replying in the middle of the night.)

[–] th3raid0r 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

In the most recent case, perhaps that could be a fix. Sure. But that won't work for every customer we have. Its certainly an idea worth bringing up to the team provided management doesn't shoot it down. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Good luck!

[–] RonSijm 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The amount of times I’ve been alerted in the middle of the night because CPU was running high for 5 minutes is too damn high.

I'd suggest to just set up automatons to fix those things automatically. Lets say 80% CPU for 5 minutes it too high. Ok, add an auto-scale rule at 65% CPU for 3 minutes to add an extra node to the cluster to load balance the CPU load

It’s like we’re trying to prevent outages by monitoring for potential issues rather than actually making our system more robust and automate-able.

Like it sounds like you're saying the issues are caused by systems not being robust and lack of automation... If they're this scared of outages and breaking SLA, they should work on having less outages, or having fall-backs when they occur.

But it could get pretty difficult to get management to do this kinda things from random suggestions from some SRE. I'd probably talk with the team-lead about this, and other people in your team, cause you're probably not the only one with these issues. And then have a meeting with the entire dev/SRE team and management to point out it's not sustainable the way it's going, and with suggestions to improve it

[–] th3raid0r 2 points 5 months ago

I’d suggest to just set up automatons to fix those things automatically. Lets say 80% CPU for 5 minutes it too high. Ok, add an auto-scale rule at 65% CPU for 3 minutes to add an extra node to the cluster to load balance the CPU load

Sure, if it were a normal service and not a distributed database that requires days to scale. Days. It's not, "add one node" and we're good. It's Add Node - Migrate Data - Add Node - Migrate Data... And in many cases, we have explicit instructions NOT to scale the customer because they won't be able to afford the larger cluster.

Also, would you auto-scale for a 5 minute blip that goes away in that time and doesn't consistently recur? I certainly wouldn't. The customer might not be able to pay for the size we put them on.

Our customers can simultaneously demand that we respond to all alerts AND not to scale their cluster. Who's fuckin' idea this was, I've no clue.

Like it sounds like you’re saying the issues are caused by systems not being robust and lack of automation… If they’re this scared of outages and breaking SLA, they should work on having less outages, or having fall-backs when they occur.

No. That's reading far more into my statement than I hoped. The reliability is indeed there - it's VERY unlikely our managed database goes down to a technology issue in our control. If it does, it's usually an operator error thing. However, if it were down to just operator error alerts and things actually impacting the end users, my job would be a dream!

Automation is somewhat there, but there's a few stakeholders that insist on human validated steps. So, while I have an ansible playbook for most issues, operating that playbook takes hours.

But it could get pretty difficult to get management to do this kinda things from random suggestions from some SRE. I’d probably talk with the team-lead about this, and other people in your team, cause you’re probably not the only one with these issues. And then have a meeting with the entire dev/SRE team and management to point out it’s not sustainable the way it’s going, and with suggestions to improve it

Sure, if it were technical. But this is largely not a technical issue, as you had assumed. The issue is that there is someone, with power, who gets to say that we must follow unreasonable customer requests to the letter. Even if those requests run counter to our sustainability.

[–] thesmokingman 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Your on-call experience is not the norm. That alone should cause you to seek another position. Experienced SREs are always in high demand. Find a place that isn’t abusing your off-hours.

In general, if my on-call engine are paged outside of business hours, I do not expect them to come in on time the next day and we’re having a postmortem ASAP. If we can’t fix the page, we’re evaluating the page’s necessity. It’s either something we can fix, something we can’t fix and don’t care about because we can’t fix it so we’re going to kill the alarm that causes the page, or ephemeral enough that we don’t think it’s worth the time chasing down. My team’s off-hours are not to be abused by stakeholders not giving us the resources we need to resolve issues and I will back that hard. In your case, you need more money and your company needs to either devote the serious resources in R&D to fix this shit, pass on the support cost to the customer at such a high level it’s actually painful for them making them get off the fucking pot, or both. For example, if a contract will affect my team’s off-hours and they’re making a bullshit alarm, they will will pay us a huge amount of money for that support. Usually the contract gets signed because stakeholders are dumb and then the first fucking time that fee hits that stupid alarm gets redlined out because financial stakeholders are smarter.

[–] th3raid0r 1 points 5 months ago

It's not even a steaming pile of crap or anything. Since it's basically a managed distributed database solution there's limits to what we can do and maintain strong consistency. Things generally take a long time and are very sequentially dependent. So we have automation of course! Buuuut there's very little comfort or trust in what is now very well exercised automation - which is the number 1 barrier in removing many sources of toil. Too many human "check this thing visually before proceeding" steps blocking an otherwise well automated process.

We are so damn close, but some key stakeholders keep wanting just one more thing in our platform support (We need ARM support, We need customer managed pki support, etc.) and we just don't get the latitude we need to actually make things reliable. It's like we're Cloud Platform / DevOps / QA / and SRE rolled into one and they can't seem to make up their damn mind on which rubric they decide to grade us on.

Hell they keep asking us to cut back our testing environment costs but demand new platform features tested at scale. We could solve it with a set of automated and standardized QA environments, but it's almost impossible to get that type of work prioritized.

My direct manager is actually pretty great, but found herself completely powerless after a recent reorg that changed the director she reports to. So all the organizational progress we made was completely reset and we're back to square one of having to explain what we want - except now we're having "kubernetes!" shouted at us while we try to chart a path.

I'm already brushing up my resume, but I must say, the new Gen-AI dominated hiring landscape is weird and bad. Until then, I just have to do the best I can with this business politics hell.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Ive managed an SRE team. I see 3 issues in your story.

  1. Upper MGMT and sales need to establish SLA and notification policy. Does the customer want to be notified of a high CPU over 5 min, or do they want notification of a slow down. If it's the latter, then you are alerting on the wrong metric. Someone needs to set expectations. If the customer wants and pays for any anomaly, well then it's your job to report it.

  2. SRE should make sense out of metrics. If all you do is stare at dashboards, then you are OPS, not SRE. SRE should setup and gather metrics and present them in ways meaningful to Dev and ops.

  3. If you are SRE, then man up and tell your manager what SREs should be doing and show some kind of idea or plan to push your monitori g forward. Be the Lead SRE if no one else is doing it.

[–] th3raid0r 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

  1. They want to be notified of anything that could potentially slow down their system. So any anomaly. The catch being is that they constantly change patterns because they introduce new workloads weekly - which wouldn't be a problem if they could better communicate their forecasts. And that's just one of a few dozen customers - again all with unique cluster configuration and needs.

  2. Yeah, it sucks. The first year was pretty great and we had a fully integrated and unified managed services team where we were getting some great automation done. Then they split the team in half in order to focus on a different flavor of our product (with an entirely new backend) and left folks who were newer (myself included) with maintaining the old product. We were even told that we should be doing minimal maintenance on the thing as the new product would be the new norm. Then once upper management remembered how contracts work, they decided we needed to support 3 new platforms without growing the team. All while onboarding new customers and growing the environment count. We're now in operational overload after some turnover that was backfilled with offshore support that has a very minimal presence.

  3. I have tried championing this, but I don't expect an ableist, masculinity shaming person like you to understand a call for social pointers on how to "manage up".

"Man Up" - good lord, way to be an ass.