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As an SRE, what do I do about Alerts caused almost entirely by poor customer communication or misuse of a product? (tucson.social)

submitted 1 year ago by th3raid0r@tucson.social to c/programming@programming.dev

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A bit more context there since you might wonder why customers can cause Sev1's.

Well, I work for a Database Technology company and we provide a managed service offering. This managed service offering has SLA's that essentially enforce a 5 minute response time for any "urgent" issue.

Well, a common urgent issue is that the customer suddenly wants to load in a bunch of new data without informing us which causes the cluster to stop accepting write loads.

It's to the point where most if not all urgent pages result in some form of scaling of the cluster.

Since this is a customer driven behavior, there is no real ability to plan for it - and since these particular customers have special requirements (and thus, less ability to automate scaling operations), I'm unsure if there is any recourse here.

It's to the point that it doesn't even feel like an SRE team anymore - we should just instead be called "On-demand scaling agents". Since we're constantly trying to scale ahead of our customers.

All in all, I'm starting to feel like this is a management/sales level issue that I cannot possibly address. If we're selling this managed service offering as essentially "magic" that can be scaled whenever they need then it seems like we're being setup for failure at the organizational level. Not to mention, not being smart about costs behind scaling and factoring that into these contracts.

So, fellow SRE's have you had to have this conversation with a larger org? What works for something like this? What doesn't? Should I just seek greener pastures at this point?

P.S. - Posted c/Programming due to lack of a c/SRE

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[–] Snowplow8861@lemmus.org 10 points 1 year ago (5 children)

If it's possible to do, and it causes a user experience issue, especially one as jarring as "stop accepting writes" you should start adding rate limits and validate inputs with rate limits expressed to the user before they hit the error rate.

To me you should already be sanitising input anyway, and this would just be part of that logic. If a user is trying to upload more than x it warns (with link to documentation of the limit). If user has gone past the rate limits, then error.

I'm not a sre or dev, just a sysadmin though. Users expect guard rails. If it's possible, it's permitted.

[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Probably not feasible in our case. We sell our DB tech based on the sheer IOPS it's capable of. It already alerts the user if the write-cache is full or the replication cache is backing up too.

The problem is, at full tilt, a 9 node cluster can take on over 1GB/s in new data. This is fine if the customer is writing over old records and doesn't require any new space. It's just that it's more common that Mr. customer added a new microservice and didn't think through how much data it requires. Thus causing rapid increase in DB disk space or IOPs that the cluster wasn't sized for.

We do have another product line in the works (we call it DBaaS) and that can autoscale because it's based on clearly defined service levels and cluster specifications. I don't think that product will have this problem.

It's just these super mega special (read: big, important, fortune 100) companies have requirements that mean they need something more hand-crafted. Otherwise we'd have automated the toil by now.

[–] Snowplow8861@lemmus.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

How are they placing this data? Api? Not possible to align disk tiers to api requests per minute? Api response limited to every 1ms for some clients, 0.1ms rate for others?

You're pretty forthcoming about the problems so I do genuinely hope you get some talking points since this issue affects, app&db design, sales, and maintenance teams minimally. Considering all aspects will give you more chance for the business to realise there's a problem that affects customer experience.

I think from handling tickets, maybe processes to auto respond to rate limited/throttled customers with 'your instance been rate limited as it has reached the {tier limit} as per your performance tier. This limit is until {rate limit block time expiry}. Support tickets related to performance or limits will be limited to P3 until this rate limit expires."

Work with your sales and contracts team to update the sla to exclude rate limited customers from priority sla.

I guess I'm still on the "maybe there's more you can do to get your feet out of the fire for customer self inflicted injury" like correctly classifying customer stuff right. It's bad when one customer can misclassify stuff and harm another customer with an issue by jumping a queue and delaying response to real issues, when it's working as intended.

If a customer was warned and did it anyway, it can't be a top priority issue, which is your argument I guess. Customers who need more, but pay for less and then have a expectation for more than they get. It's really not your fault or problem. But if it's affecting you I guess I'm wondering how to get it to affect you less.

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