Simplifying OPS/SRE Teams’ Work @ADEO through Formalization of User Journey Maps with TheyDo

In the realm of engineering and operations, the significance of understanding user needs and interactions cannot be underestimated. This is where the formalization of User Journey Maps (UJM) becomes crucial, particularly with tools like TheyDo. But how does this facilitate the work of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams? Let’s take a closer look.

User Journey Maps, or user journey visualizations, are essential tools for visualizing and comprehending the steps users take when interacting with a product or service. They illuminate activities and critical processes for users, forming the very foundation of instrumentation and analysis work for an SRE team.

As SRE teams are tasked with ensuring the reliability and availability of services, they must understand how users interact with these systems, their needs, expectations, and potential friction points that may disrupt their experience.

This is where UX teams and UJMs come into play. By formalizing user journeys, teams can identify critical touchpoints, sensitive data flows, and key steps in the user journey. This deep understanding enables SRE teams to better focus their instrumentation and monitoring efforts, honing in on aspects most relevant to the user experience.

Building on this solid foundation, our SRE teams will define a comprehensive set of Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to establish and monitor performance and service availability. By identifying key moments of user interaction and critical steps in the user journey, our SRE teams can proactively adjust monitoring strategies to swiftly detect potential issues. Furthermore, by understanding these critical user journey steps, they can anticipate bottlenecks and potential failure points, enabling them to implement preventive measures to mitigate them.

Therefore, they will create a code block that defines how we measure the indicator and what threshold we apply to satisfy the user.

BUT WHY CREATE THIS CODE BLOCK (SLO AS CODE — SLAC) INSTEAD OF DOING IT MANUALLY IN THE MONITORING TOOL?

• Increased automation: Automating SLOs reduces manual work and errors, ensuring accurate and consistent SLOs.
• Real-time monitoring: SLaC enables continuous monitoring of SLOs, providing real-time insights into system performance.
• Early detection of issues: SLaC can trigger alerts when SLOs are violated, enabling early detection of problems and prompt resolution.
• Integration with DevOps tools: SLaC can be integrated with DevOps tools such as Github Actions, streamlining the DevOps process and improving efficiency.
• Portability: SLaC are defined in standardized formats like YAML, allowing portability across different environments and tools.
• Enhanced collaboration: SLaC provide a shared platform for development, operations, and management teams to collaborate on SLOs and ensure alignment (single common GitHub repository across Adeo).
• Improved test coverage: SLaC can guide testing efforts, ensuring tests cover critical performance areas and SLOs are maintained.

WHAT RESULTS DOES THIS BRING US?

This provides us with clear and intelligible indicators for the business, correctly labeled for domain attribution.

Thanks to the collaboration between SRE teams and UX researcher, we can now openly discuss the real performance of our services.

Let’s take the example of a business requirement that demands adding a target response time of under 25 milliseconds in 95% of cases. Upon reviewing our graphs, we observe that we exceed this target, achieving a success rate of 99.98%.

With our instrumentation, our Ops/SRE team can communicate with the business in clear terms and provide insights into the service levels achieved for each business function. This fosters mutual understanding and informed decision-making.

Once again at Adeo, we demonstrate that alone we go faster, but together we go further, and that collaboration among experts produces exceptional results.