Every production outage caused by a service that launched without monitoring, without runbooks, without capacity planning, without anyone knowing who owns it at 3 AM – every one of those was preventable. A production readiness review is the gate between “it works on my machine” and “it is ready for real users.” Google formalized this as the PRR process. You do not need Google-scale infrastructure to benefit from it.
Every SRE resource explains what SLOs are. Few explain how to actually implement them from scratch – the Prometheus queries, the error budget math, the alerting rules, and the conversations with product managers when the budget runs out. This guide covers all of it.
SLIs must measure what users experience. Internal metrics like CPU usage or queue depth are useful for debugging but are not SLIs because users do not care about your CPU – they care whether the page loaded.
February 22, 2026
This checklist is designed for agents to audit a Kubernetes cluster before production workloads run on it. Every item includes the verification command and what a passing result looks like. Work through each category sequentially. A failing item in Cluster Health should be fixed before checking Workload Configuration.
These are non-negotiable. If any of these fail, stop and fix them before evaluating anything else.