All SRE type work. Where it specifically shines is whenever you need to dig deep into linux kernel specifics, networking specifics, code in different languages to handle issues (Rust (which I don't know), Go, Python, Bash, etc...), All sorts of error messages it knows so often what precisely needs to be done to resolve, using and configuring graphing, database, TSDB type queries, formulating a clever tcpdump query for a particular scenario, etc...
Google Used to be able to handle a lot of the non-procedural questions - but somewhere in circa 2022/2023 something started happening to it's results and I started getting back mostly SEO churn, to the point I was going back to using manuals and having to dig in and learn the fundamentals on a lot of things - which is unsustainable if you are touching 30-50 different technology stacks.
Chat changed all that - I can now go 3-5 levels deep in some stack, ask some incredibly nuanced question, get a reasonable answer that points me in the right direction, close off the issue and then move onto the next one.
> having to dig in and learn the fundamentals on a lot of things - which is unsustainable if you are touching 30-50 different technology stacks.
IMO, this is the crux of the problem, and it’s caused by allowing dev teams to use whatever stack they want, without also requiring them to support it. More cynically, it will always be the case if teams are allowed to use whatever they want, regardless of “service ownership” – because when there’s a SEV-1 and the owning teams have no idea what’s wrong, the SREs are going to be told to fix it.
