30-Day SRE Pilot Checklist

• Define 2–3 Service Level Objectives (SLOs)

  Select key metrics for critical user journeys: availability (e.g., 99.9% uptime), latency (e.g., p95 <200ms), and error rate (e.g., <1%). Focus on what customers actually experience.
• Build SLO dashboards with real-time tracking

  Create visual dashboards showing target vs. actual performance, error budget remaining, and burn-down rate. Use tools like Grafana, Datadog, or Azure Monitor.
• Establish error budget policies

  Define decision rules: tighten change velocity at 50% budget consumed, pause non-critical releases at 80%, and trigger incident review when budget exhausted.

• Configure symptom-based alerts for SLO breaches

  Create alerts that fire on customer-facing symptoms (high error rate, latency spikes) rather than infrastructure noise (CPU %, disk space). Reduce alert fatigue by focusing on impact.
• Run tabletop exercise with recent incident

  Walk through a past incident using the postmortem template. Identify detection gaps, communication delays, and improvement opportunities. Practice blameless culture.
• Prepare incident communication templates

  Draft message templates for internal (Slack/Teams) and customer-facing (email/status page) updates. Include severity levels, update cadence, and escalation paths.

• Implement error budget gating for one release

  Apply budget checks before deploying: verify sufficient error budget remains, run preflight tests, and prepare rollback plan. Document the approval workflow.
• Conduct real incident postmortem

  Document a production incident with timeline, root cause, impact analysis, and action items. Focus on system improvements, not individual blame. Ship at least one prevention fix.

• Measure pilot outcomes and metrics

  Analyze key results: number of incidents, Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), Mean Time to Recover (MTTR), change failure rate, and error budget consumption trends.
• Identify practices to codify and scale

  Determine which SRE practices delivered value and should become standard operating procedures. Document learnings and move stretch goals to backlog for future iterations.
• Present results to stakeholders

  Create a one-page summary highlighting wins (reduced MTTR, fewer incidents), challenges faced, and recommended next steps for broader SRE adoption.

Clarify who does what during the 30-day pilot. Adapt roles to fit your org structure.

Legend: R Responsible (does the work) · A Accountable (final approval) · C Consulted (provides input) · I Informed (kept updated)