A day in the life of an SRE | Mohit Shukla
For the second edition of the A day in the life of an SRE series, we have Mohit Shukla. Mohit is known as ethicalmohit on interwebs. He works as a Site Reliability Engineer at Bureau, Inc.
Mohit introduces himself as an SRE generalist with seven years of experience. He has worked on multi-dimensions of the infrastructure from data centers to the cloud. He has expertise in troubleshooting, networking, and security.
I came across Mohit’s article on how they have implemented OpenTelemetry at Bureau and was quite intrigued and decided to interview him for this substack.
Let’s start with our questions.
What is your work setup like? Are you a dual monitor / single monitor person? Which are the tools you cannot do without for day-to-day productivity?
Single Monitor
I use Warp Terminal.
VS Code is my text editor/IDE of choice.
If you have not checked Warp, do give it a spin. It is a Rust based terminal.
What does your typical day look like? Do you start with a dashboard and end with a dashboard? Any typical routine that you follow?
My day starts with checking different dashboards, including edge, in the morning. I also look after the alerts the day before.
The rest of the day is spent reading blogs, working on the planned tasks, and meeting with different teams for architectural issues/improvements.
Which are your go-to tools for debugging an incident?
Network debugging tools such as dig, traceroute, telnet, curl, etc.
I use Postman as well.
For Observability, I stick to NewRelic and Cloudwatch.
Any memorable incident you helped/tracked/fixed?
Yes! One of the lambdas was created for cleanup once deleted all of the docker artifacts attached to the service. 🤯
What do you miss in the current observability landscape that will help you in your work as an SRE?
Correlation between metrics and the traces.
Unified Dashboard for the traces, logs, and metrics.
How many dashboards do you track over a day?
Four.
What do you want from other team members from engineering that will help you in your job?
Documentation and instrumentation of the application.
Have the tenets of an SRE seeped into your day-to-day life?
Perseverance.
How do you manage burnout?
I cannot manage it completely but generally by I try to handle it by walking out of the house.
If you were not an SRE, what would you be doing?
Game streamer 🎮
Do you have any suggestions for us questions that we can ask fellow SREs?
What are their opinions on platform engineering? How are they keeping up with it?
Where can people reach out to you?
Sure, follow me on Linkedin.
Thanks, Mohit, for sharing your story with us.