SRE / Operator Learning Path

Purpose: For SREs and operators, provides a guided reading order focused on day-2 operations, monitoring, upgrades, and incident response.

Reading Order

#	Phase	Topic	Link	Time
1	Foundations	Architecture overview	Architecture	10 min
2	Foundations	Platform services (20+ services, versions)	Service Catalog	10 min
3	Foundations	CLI commands reference	CLI Commands	10 min
4	Observability	Monitoring stack (Prometheus + Grafana + Alertmanager)	Stack Overview	10 min
5	Observability	Loki for logs	Loki	10 min
6	Observability	Tempo for traces	Tempo	10 min
7	Observability	Dashboards & alerts	Dashboards	15 min
8	Operations	Day 2 overview	Day 2	10 min
9	Operations	Health checks (opencenter cluster doctor)	Health	10 min
10	Operations	Drift detection (opencenter cluster drift detect)	Drift	10 min
11	Upgrades	Kubernetes upgrades	K8s Upgrades	15 min
12	Upgrades	Service upgrades (gitops-base tag pinning)	Service Upgrades	10 min
13	Reliability	Backup & restore with Velero	Backup	15 min
14	Reliability	Disaster recovery	DR	10 min
15	Scaling	Add worker pools (--server-pool flag)	Workers	10 min
16	Scaling	Node replacement	Replace	10 min
17	Secrets	Key lifecycle (check, rotate, sync, validate)	Key Rotation	10 min
18	Troubleshooting	FluxCD reconciliation issues	FluxCD	10 min
19	Troubleshooting	Networking issues	Network	10 min
20	Troubleshooting	CLI errors	CLI Errors	10 min

Daily Operations CLI Commands

# Health & status
opencenter cluster status my-cluster
opencenter cluster doctor my-cluster
opencenter cluster drift detect my-cluster

# Secrets lifecycle
opencenter secrets keys check                   # Shows days until expiration
opencenter secrets validate my-cluster          # Detect drift
opencenter secrets sync my-cluster              # Re-encrypt after changes

# Service management
opencenter cluster service status               # All service states
opencenter cluster service enable <svc>         # Enable a service
opencenter cluster service disable <svc>        # Disable a service

# Backup
opencenter cluster backup create my-cluster
opencenter cluster backup restore <id>

# FluxCD
flux get kustomizations                         # Check reconciliation
flux reconcile source git flux-system           # Force source refresh
flux reconcile kustomization <name>             # Force kustomization apply

Observability Stack (from openCenter-gitops-base)

Service	Version	Purpose
kube-prometheus-stack	77.6.0	Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager
Loki	6.45.2	Log aggregation
Mimir	6.0.3	Long-term metrics storage
Tempo	1.55.0	Distributed tracing
OpenTelemetry	0.11.1	Telemetry collection pipeline

Runbook Index

After completing this path, familiarize yourself with the Runbooks for standardized incident response procedures.