Clicking on a trace in the timeline will give you a more detailed view and breakdown of the traced call and the subsequent calls that were made.
Q: Can I replicate my production/staging environment in the sandbox?
Your production/staging environment can be replicated if it is hosted on GCP(Google Cloud Platform).
Q: Can I check for observability of my replicated environment?
The sandbox has a demo application(hipster shop) that comes pre-instrumented with observability. If you are using your own environment, you will need to instrument your microservices accordingly.
Q: Can I send alerts to an external platform?
As of now the demo sandbox has an inbuilt incident management system with basic functionality. Sending alerts to an external platform can be done after creating a custom module.
Q: How much does the Sandbox cost?
The sandbox is provided free of charge. However, since it can only be used on the Google Cloud Platform(GCP) platform, any computing resources consumed will be billed.
Q: Can I improve my MTTR(Mean time to Respond) with the sandbox?
The sandbox has a feature called “SRE recipes” that auto-generates issues in your environment. It is a good way to learn the skills to fix things in production. It is important to note that SRE recipes will only be working in the demo application provided with the sandbox. You will need to create your own scripts to auto-generate problems in your custom setup. By practicing, SREs can get better at fixing issues in production and reducing the MTTR(Mean time to respond) to incidents.
Q: Can I test the performance of my production environment in the sandbox?
Yes. The sandbox environment can be used to test your production environment since it has a tool to generate synthetic traffic. However, the sandbox does not have any tools for thorough unit testing and performance testing.
Q: What new features will be added to the sandbox?
Runbooks are expected to be added in the sandbox in the near future. Creating effective runbooks is an important skill all SREs need to acquire.
Conclusion
The SRE sandbox is a great place to test out your skills for becoming a better SRE. To be effective in their work, SREs need expertise in the areas of observability, performance testing and distributed architecture. The sandbox provides a way for budding SREs to test out different scenarios. Some possible scenarios include checking the performance of your application under different user loads, getting better at resolving critical issues and testing out different on-call strategies.
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