Understanding the business outcome and the overall functionality of a system consisting of distributed services and the infrastructure components to run them at scale is almost like solving a Rubix cube. Once an incident occurs, it is not enough to look at the single side of a rubix cube. In order to solve the puzzle, all sides of the cube need to be considered. Monitoring a distributed system should not be the single effort of a single engineering team. Observability should be a goal for all engineering teams. Nevertheless, it is often a mantra just for SRE teams. Coming from the perspective of an application engineer, I will outline how an application engineer benefits from understanding infrastructure and common incidents and how SRE teams can benefit from understanding common failures when talking about the application code.

Let’s take a deeper look at what collaboration across different engineering teams means and how it supports the process of resolving the rubix cube together.