Written by Jamie Wilkinson Edited by Kavita Guliani May the queries flow, and the pager stay silent. Traditional SRE blessing Monitoring, the bottom layer of the Hierarchy of Production Needs , is fundamental to running a stable service. Monitoring enables service owners to make rational decisions about the impact of changes to the service, apply the scientific method to incident response, and of course ensure their reason for existence: to measure the service’s alignment with business goals (see Monitoring Distributed Systems ). Regardless of whether or not a service enjoys SRE support, it should be run in a symbiotic relationship with its monitoring. But having been tasked with ultimate responsibility for Google Production, SREs develop a particularly intimate knowledge of the monitoring infrastructure that supports their service. Monitoring a very large system is challenging for a couple of reasons: The sheer number of components being analyze The nee...