SRE 04 — Production Readiness Workshop

SME Track: SRE & Infra Ops

Presenter: Specialist (DSR)

Date: 2026-10-28

SLB × Elastic Workshop Program

Overview

Production readiness for Elastic Observability — SLOs, alerts, Streams, and AI ops on any deployment.

Where this applies

These labs run on Observability Serverless — a fully managed project so you can practice without cluster operations.

The same capabilities you explore here — ES|QL, Streams, AI Assistant, Agent Builder, Workflows, and SLOs — are available on Elastic Cloud Hosted (ECH) and self-managed deployments.

Serverless mainly saves operational toil (sizing, ILM, Fleet, upgrades). Your observability skills transfer directly.

Session topics

  • SLOs, alerts, and Streams readiness
  • AI Assistant and Workflows in production runbooks
  • Production checklist — plus ILM/Fleet on ECH and self-managed

Why these features?

◉SLOsUser-facing reliability, not just green dashboards
🔔Observability AlertsSignal without the noise
⚡WorkflowsAutomate alert response safely
⎇Elastic StreamsManaged routing and processing for telemetry
✦AI AssistantNatural language over your live telemetry

Use → to see why each feature matters for SLB.

Why SLOs?

User-facing reliability, not just green dashboards

Without it

CPU graphs look fine while customers see errors — no shared error budget or burn-rate language with product teams.

With SLOs

SLOs define availability/latency targets from real traces and metrics, with burn alerts before users flood support.

  • Align SRE and product on measurable reliability
  • Prioritize fixes when error budget is draining
  • Native in Observability on every deployment — no custom PromQL recording rules required
SLI signal
SLO target
Burn alert

Why Observability Alerts?

Signal without the noise

Without it

Alert storms, duplicate pages, and rules that never get tuned — on-call learns to ignore the channel.

With Observability Alerts

Threshold, anomaly, and SLO-based rules with grouping, suppression, and AI-assisted triage in one alerts UI.

  • Tune rules to SLB services instead of one-size-fits-all thresholds
  • Deduplicate and acknowledge with context for handoffs
  • Feed Workflows for automated first response
Rule
Alert
Triage

Why Workflows?

Automate alert response safely

Without it

Manual Slack pings, ticket copy-paste, and runbook hunts — alerts fire but nothing moves until a human acts.

With Workflows

Workflows chain connectors (Slack, PagerDuty, webhooks) with approval steps when alerts or SLOs breach.

  • Notify the right channel with context automatically
  • Add human-in-the-loop before remediation scripts run
  • Reduce toil without bypassing change control
Alert
Workflow
Notify / act

Why Elastic Streams?

Managed routing and processing for telemetry

Without it

Custom ingest pipelines, index templates, and rollover policies per team — fragile, hard to govern, and different on every cluster.

With Elastic Streams

Streams define how logs, metrics, and traces are routed, processed, and retained — on Serverless, ECH, and self-managed, with a unified UI.

  • Reduce DIY pipeline + ILM work with declarative stream rules
  • Consistent ownership and naming across SLB domains
  • On self-managed/ECH you may still use ILM — Streams simplify routing either way
Ingest
Streams
Search & alerts

Why AI Assistant?

Natural language over your live telemetry

Without it

Every investigator rebuilds the same ES|QL, scrolls dashboards, and writes runbook prose from scratch.

With AI Assistant

Ask questions in plain language — get ES|QL, summaries, and correlated logs/traces grounded in your project data.

  • Onboard new engineers without memorizing query syntax
  • Explain spikes and error patterns during live incidents
  • Draft queries you can save, share, and reuse
Question
AI Assistant
Evidence

Hands-on lab

Your lab uses Elastic Observability Serverless for a zero-ops learning environment.

The steps and features are the same on ECH and on-prem — follow the assignment panel when Kibana opens.

Instruqt track: slb-sme-sre-infra-ops

Resources

  • Registration: events.elastic.co/slbworkshops
  • Repo: github.com/poulsbopete/slb-workshops
  • Use ← → arrow keys to navigate slides