SRE Engineer

What it does

When your agent uses it

• Defining SLIs and SLOs for a new service
• Calculating error budgets and burn-rate policies
• Designing golden signal dashboards and actionable alerts
• Planning chaos experiments and checking recovery targets
• Writing blameless postmortems and automating repetitive operations

Example prompts

• “Define SLOs for our checkout API and work out the monthly error budget.”
• “Design alerts based on the four golden signals, each linked to a runbook.”
• “Write a blameless postmortem template and fill it in for last week's database failover.”
• “Plan a chaos experiment that kills one worker node and verify recovery against our RTO.”

Workflow steps

6 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

1. 1Assess reliability - Review architecture, SLOs, incidents, toil levels
2. 2Define SLOs - Identify meaningful SLIs and set appropriate targets
3. 3Verify alignment - Confirm SLO targets reflect user expectations before proceeding
4. 4Implement monitoring - Build golden signal dashboards and alerting
5. 5Automate toil - Identify repetitive tasks and build automation
6. 6Test resilience - Design and execute chaos experiments; verify recovery meets RTO/RPO targets before marking the experiment complete…

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 1be15d8. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

• Tool permissions

  Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

  From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

• Runs code

  No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md (its code samples are yaml, promql and python).

  From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

• Network

  Links to these hosts (documentation or services it may open):

  • github.com
  • synergetic.solutions
  • jeffallan.github.io

  From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

• Credentials

  Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

  From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

SRE Engineer loads about 1.7k tokens when it runs, and up to ~17k if it reads all its reference files. Until then it costs about 99 tokens; SKILL.md has 284 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it

~99

When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches

~1.7k

With references · SKILL.md plus every file in references/, read only if the agent opens them

~17k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from Jeffallan/claude-skills at commit 1be15d8, republished under its MIT licence (© Jeffallan). 284 words, ~1,730 tokens.

name

sre-engineer

description

Defines service level objectives, creates error budget policies, designs incident response procedures, develops capacity models, and produces monitoring configurations and automation scripts for production systems. Use when defining SLIs/SLOs, managing error budgets, building reliable systems at scale, incident management, chaos engineering, toil reduction, or capacity planning.

license

MIT

metadata.author

https://github.com/Jeffallan

metadata.company

https://synergetic.solutions

metadata.version

1.1.0

metadata.domain

devops

metadata.triggers

SRE, site reliability, SLO, SLI, error budget, incident management, chaos engineering, toil reduction, on-call, MTTR

metadata.role

specialist

metadata.scope

implementation

metadata.output-format

code

metadata.related-skills

devops-engineer, cloud-architect, kubernetes-specialist

# 99.9% availability SLO over a 30-day window
# Allowed downtime: (1 - 0.999) * 30 * 24 * 60 = 43.2 minutes/month
# Error budget (request-based): 0.001 * total_requests

# Example: 10M requests/month → 10,000 error budget requests
# If 5,000 errors consumed in week 1 → 50% budget burned in 25% of window
# → Trigger error budget policy: freeze non-critical releases

groups:
  - name: slo_availability
    rules:
      # Fast burn: 2% budget in 1h (14.4x burn rate)
      - alert: HighErrorBudgetBurn
        expr: |
          (
            sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[1h]))
            /
            sum(rate(http_requests_total[1h]))
          ) > 0.014400
          and
          (
            sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m]))
            /
            sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m]))
          ) > 0.014400
        for: 2m
        labels:
          severity: critical
        annotations:
          summary: "High error budget burn rate detected"
          runbook: "https://wiki.internal/runbooks/high-error-burn"

      # Slow burn: 5% budget in 6h (1x burn rate sustained)
      - alert: SlowErrorBudgetBurn
        expr: |
          (
            sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[6h]))
            /
            sum(rate(http_requests_total[6h]))
          ) > 0.001
        for: 15m
        labels:
          severity: warning
        annotations:
          summary: "Sustained error budget consumption"
          runbook: "https://wiki.internal/runbooks/slow-error-burn"

# Latency — 99th percentile request duration
histogram_quantile(0.99, sum(rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m])) by (le, service))

# Traffic — requests per second by service
sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m])) by (service)

# Errors — error rate ratio
sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m])) by (service)
  /
sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m])) by (service)

# Saturation — CPU throttling ratio
sum(rate(container_cpu_cfs_throttled_seconds_total[5m])) by (pod)
  /
sum(rate(container_cpu_cfs_periods_total[5m])) by (pod)

#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""Auto-remediation: restart pods exceeding error threshold."""
import subprocess, sys, json

ERROR_THRESHOLD = 0.05  # 5% error rate triggers restart

def get_error_rate(service: str) -> float:
    """Query Prometheus for current error rate."""
    import urllib.request
    query = f'sum(rate(http_requests_total{{status=~"5..",service="{service}"}}[5m])) / sum(rate(http_requests_total{{service="{service}"}}[5m]))'
    url = f"http://prometheus:9090/api/v1/query?query={urllib.request.quote(query)}"
    with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as resp:
        data = json.load(resp)
    results = data["data"]["result"]
    return float(results[0]["value"][1]) if results else 0.0

def restart_deployment(namespace: str, deployment: str) -> None:
    subprocess.run(
        ["kubectl", "rollout", "restart", f"deployment/{deployment}", "-n", namespace],
        check=True
    )
    print(f"Restarted {namespace}/{deployment}")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    service, namespace, deployment = sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2], sys.argv[3]
    rate = get_error_rate(service)
    print(f"Error rate for {service}: {rate:.2%}")
    if rate > ERROR_THRESHOLD:
        restart_deployment(namespace, deployment)
    else:
        print("Within SLO threshold — no action required")

© Jeffallan, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

SKILL.md and 5 other files (references) in skills/sre-engineer of Jeffallan/claude-skills.

• SKILL.md
• references/automation-toil.md
• references/error-budget-policy.md
• references/incident-chaos.md
• references/monitoring-alerting.md
• references/slo-sli-management.md

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 1be15d8