{"podcast":{"title":"Reliability Enablers","slug":"reliability-enablers-6320409","podcast_index_feed_id":6320409,"rss_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/2473001/s/120870.rss","website_url":"https://read.srepath.com/s/podcast","image_url":"https://substackcdn.com/feed/podcast/2473001/s/120870/abfe10d2208d01555e256a06fdbdb005.jpg","author":"Ash Patel & Sebastian Vietz","episode_count":71,"summary":"Audio conversations around reliability, especially around enabling it across teams and organizations","last_synced_at":"2026-06-13T00:20:34.814387+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/reliability-enablers-6320409"},"episode":{"title":"#59 Who handles monitoring in your team and how?","slug":"59-who-handles-monitoring-in-your-team-and-how","published_at":"2024-09-24T11:35:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/reliability-enablers-6320409/59-who-handles-monitoring-in-your-team-and-how","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/reliability-enablers-6320409","url":"https://read.srepath.com/p/59-who-handles-monitoring-in-your","audio_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/149286810/013ee1c44aedcdd87e7414d84939e4d7.mp3","summary":"Why many copy Google’s monitoring team setup * Google’s Influence. Google played a key role in defining the concept of software reliability. * Success in Reliability. Few can dispute Google’s ability to ensure high levels of reliability and its ability to share useful ways to improve it in other settings BUT there’s a problem: * It’s not always replicable. While Google's practices are admired, they may not be a perfect fit for every team. What is Google’s monitoring approach within teams? Here’s the thing that Google does: * Google assigns one or two people per team to manage monitoring. * Even with centralized infrastructure, a dedicated person handles monitoring. * Many organizations use a separate observability team, unlike Google's integrated approach If your org is large enough and prioritizes reliability highly enough, you might find it feasible to follow Google’s model to the tee. Otherwise, a centralized team with occasional “embedded x engineer” secondments might be more effective. Can your team mimic Google’s model? Here are a few things you should factor in: Size matters Google's model works because of its scale and technical complexity. Many organizations don’t have the size, resources, or technology to replicate this. What are the options for your team? Dedicated monitoring team (very popular but $$$) If you have the resources, you might create a dedicated observability team. This might call for a ~$500k+ personnel budget so it’s not something that a startup or SME can easily justify. Dedicate SREs to monitoring work (effective but difficult to manage) You might do this on rotation or make an SRE permanently “responsible for all monitoring matters”. Putting SREs on permanent tasks might lead to burnout as it might not suit their goals, and rotation work re…","meta_description":"Why many copy Google’s monitoring team setup * Google’s Influence. Google played a key role in defining the concept of software reliability. * Success in…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":497,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/reliability-enablers-6320409/episodes/59-who-handles-monitoring-in-your-team-and-how/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/reliability-enablers-6320409/59-who-handles-monitoring-in-your-team-and-how.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}