What do SREs primarily seek to achieve through post-mortem granularity?

SREs, or Site Reliability Engineers, focus on understanding incidents and outages thoroughly, which is where post-mortem granularity comes into play. By achieving a high level of granularity in post-mortem analyses, SREs can dissect incidents to identify not just what happened, but why it happened, how it can be prevented in the future, and what actions need to be taken to improve the systems involved.

This detailed examination gives teams a clear insight into incidents, allowing them to understand the root causes and the sequence of events leading up to the failure. Such understanding is crucial for implementing changes that can enhance overall system reliability and prevent similar incidents from reoccurring. This approach enables learning and fosters a culture of continuous improvement, making the systems more resilient over time.

While improved collaboration and reduced service downtime are important outcomes of better incident management practices, they are secondary benefits that stem from having a clear insight into what went wrong and how to fix it effectively. Enhancing application features is often a separate focus and not a primary goal of post-mortem granularity.