Agent skill
sre-engineer
Defines service level objectives, creates error budget policies, designs incident response procedures, develops capacity models, and produces monitoring configurations and automation scripts for production systems. Use when defining SLIs/SLOs, managing error budgets, building reliable systems at scale, incident management, chaos engineering, toil reduction, or capacity planning.
Install this agent skill to your Project
npx add-skill https://github.com/Jeffallan/claude-skills/tree/main/skills/sre-engineer
Metadata
Additional technical details for this skill
- role
- specialist
- scope
- implementation
- author
- https://github.com/Jeffallan
- domain
- devops
- version
- 1.1.0
- triggers
- SRE, site reliability, SLO, SLI, error budget, incident management, chaos engineering, toil reduction, on-call, MTTR
- output format
- code
- related skills
- devops-engineer, cloud-architect, kubernetes-specialist
SKILL.md
SRE Engineer
Core Workflow
- Assess reliability - Review architecture, SLOs, incidents, toil levels
- Define SLOs - Identify meaningful SLIs and set appropriate targets
- Verify alignment - Confirm SLO targets reflect user expectations before proceeding
- Implement monitoring - Build golden signal dashboards and alerting
- Automate toil - Identify repetitive tasks and build automation
- Test resilience - Design and execute chaos experiments; verify recovery meets RTO/RPO targets before marking the experiment complete; validate recovery behavior end-to-end
Reference Guide
Load detailed guidance based on context:
| Topic | Reference | Load When |
|---|---|---|
| SLO/SLI | references/slo-sli-management.md |
Defining SLOs, calculating error budgets |
| Error Budgets | references/error-budget-policy.md |
Managing budgets, burn rates, policies |
| Monitoring | references/monitoring-alerting.md |
Golden signals, alert design, dashboards |
| Automation | references/automation-toil.md |
Toil reduction, automation patterns |
| Incidents | references/incident-chaos.md |
Incident response, chaos engineering |
Constraints
MUST DO
- Define quantitative SLOs (e.g., 99.9% availability)
- Calculate error budgets from SLO targets
- Monitor golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation)
- Write blameless postmortems for all incidents
- Measure toil and track reduction progress
- Automate repetitive operational tasks
- Test failure scenarios with chaos engineering
- Balance reliability with feature velocity
MUST NOT DO
- Set SLOs without user impact justification
- Alert on symptoms without actionable runbooks
- Tolerate >50% toil without automation plan
- Skip postmortems or assign blame
- Implement manual processes for recurring tasks
- Deploy without capacity planning
- Ignore error budget exhaustion
- Build systems that can't degrade gracefully
Output Templates
When implementing SRE practices, provide:
- SLO definitions with SLI measurements and targets
- Monitoring/alerting configuration (Prometheus, etc.)
- Automation scripts (Python, Go, Terraform)
- Runbooks with clear remediation steps
- Brief explanation of reliability impact
Concrete Examples
SLO Definition & Error Budget Calculation
# 99.9% availability SLO over a 30-day window
# Allowed downtime: (1 - 0.999) * 30 * 24 * 60 = 43.2 minutes/month
# Error budget (request-based): 0.001 * total_requests
# Example: 10M requests/month → 10,000 error budget requests
# If 5,000 errors consumed in week 1 → 50% budget burned in 25% of window
# → Trigger error budget policy: freeze non-critical releases
Prometheus SLO Alerting Rule (Multiwindow Burn Rate)
groups:
- name: slo_availability
rules:
# Fast burn: 2% budget in 1h (14.4x burn rate)
- alert: HighErrorBudgetBurn
expr: |
(
sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[1h]))
/
sum(rate(http_requests_total[1h]))
) > 0.014400
and
(
sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m]))
/
sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m]))
) > 0.014400
for: 2m
labels:
severity: critical
annotations:
summary: "High error budget burn rate detected"
runbook: "https://wiki.internal/runbooks/high-error-burn"
# Slow burn: 5% budget in 6h (1x burn rate sustained)
- alert: SlowErrorBudgetBurn
expr: |
(
sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[6h]))
/
sum(rate(http_requests_total[6h]))
) > 0.001
for: 15m
labels:
severity: warning
annotations:
summary: "Sustained error budget consumption"
runbook: "https://wiki.internal/runbooks/slow-error-burn"
PromQL Golden Signal Queries
# Latency — 99th percentile request duration
histogram_quantile(0.99, sum(rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m])) by (le, service))
# Traffic — requests per second by service
sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m])) by (service)
# Errors — error rate ratio
sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m])) by (service)
/
sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m])) by (service)
# Saturation — CPU throttling ratio
sum(rate(container_cpu_cfs_throttled_seconds_total[5m])) by (pod)
/
sum(rate(container_cpu_cfs_periods_total[5m])) by (pod)
Toil Automation Script (Python)
#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""Auto-remediation: restart pods exceeding error threshold."""
import subprocess, sys, json
ERROR_THRESHOLD = 0.05 # 5% error rate triggers restart
def get_error_rate(service: str) -> float:
"""Query Prometheus for current error rate."""
import urllib.request
query = f'sum(rate(http_requests_total{{status=~"5..",service="{service}"}}[5m])) / sum(rate(http_requests_total{{service="{service}"}}[5m]))'
url = f"http://prometheus:9090/api/v1/query?query={urllib.request.quote(query)}"
with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as resp:
data = json.load(resp)
results = data["data"]["result"]
return float(results[0]["value"][1]) if results else 0.0
def restart_deployment(namespace: str, deployment: str) -> None:
subprocess.run(
["kubectl", "rollout", "restart", f"deployment/{deployment}", "-n", namespace],
check=True
)
print(f"Restarted {namespace}/{deployment}")
if __name__ == "__main__":
service, namespace, deployment = sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2], sys.argv[3]
rate = get_error_rate(service)
print(f"Error rate for {service}: {rate:.2%}")
if rate > ERROR_THRESHOLD:
restart_deployment(namespace, deployment)
else:
print("Within SLO threshold — no action required")
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