The Future of the SRE: Remote Work

The majority of site reliability engineers (SREs) will be working remotely post COVID-19, according to the 2020 SRE Survey Report from Catchpoint and the DevOps Institute.

Google says SREs should be doing 50% ops work and 50% dev work, yet having a 50/50 workload split seems to be a pipe dream, according to the survey. The majority of respondents are currently spending 75% of their time on operations resulting in far less of their time being devoted to development.

Additionally, 53% of respondents said they were being involved too late in the application lifecycle.

When SREs are invited early into the development process, organizations can mature to more advanced observability resulting in improved service reliability, incident management effectiveness and customer satisfaction.

"Solving complex problems and ensuring reliability in today's highly distributed world can be very difficult and requires greater monitoring and true observability. Prior to the pandemic, most companies had a handle on end-user/customer experience monitoring for distributed systems," said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint. "But now with a greater distribution of users comes new challenges and added reliability needs. True observability is the key to ensure reliability and customer experiences for all things distributed."

Jayne Groll, CEO, DevOps Institute, added: "SRE is one of the most innovative approaches to managing services since the early days of ITIL and is most closely aligned with the principles and practices of Agile and DevOps. The data in this report supports the rising criticality of both SRE as a practice and Site Reliability Engineer as a role for any organization trying to adapt to the digital age."

Highlights of survey results include:

Observability Components Exist - Observability Does Not

When asked what tool categories SREs are using today, the majority (93 percent) chose monitoring as compared with 53 percent choosing observability.

Additionally, when asked about their key responsibilities, the majority ignored those aligned with the observability pillars (events, metrics and tracing) highlighting the lack of true observability.

True observability requires monitoring of external outputs to determine how reliable internal systems function.

Heavy Ops Work Load Comes at a Cost

DevOps appears to be in a tug of war, and Ops is winning in the SRE community with the pre-COVID survey showing that 75% said they are spending the majority of their time on Ops, resulting in increased costs of owning and maintaining systems.

Perhaps widening the gap, the survey showed that two and a half months into working from home, the survey results showed a net 10% increase in Ops related responsibilities.


Challenges of the Shift to Remote Work

The post-pandemic environment has resulted in a major shift on where SREs will be located, with nearly 50% of SREs believing they will be working remotely post COVID-19, as compared to only 19% prior to the pandemic.

Additionally, 9% of respondents felt incident management has improved.

However, there are cautionary findings for organizations considering the structure of SRE teams post-COVID, as many respondents noted they are dealing with the following challenges:

■ 41% state that half or more of their work is a toil with mostly manual, repetitive, and tactical jobs that could be automated.

■ 52% said they spent too much time debugging

■ More than half of respondents felt that personal challenges included staying focused and having a good work/life balance while working from home

Recommendations for the SRE

Below are a few recommendations for SREs based on the survey's findings:

■ Be sure to include consideration for not only your code, but also the networks, third party services, and delivery chain components, to evaluate how well the three observability pillars are applied through this new digital experience observability lens.

■ Work to be included earlier in the development process should shift reliability further left to reduce cost, increase team alignment, and identify constraints that can be removed.

■ Turn newly surfaced, or previously-ignored challenges into strategic differentiators. Focusing on challenges like morale, employee experience, work/life balance, and employee engagement and sentiment may showcase a company's employee-first mentality to attract or retain top talent.

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The Future of the SRE: Remote Work

The majority of site reliability engineers (SREs) will be working remotely post COVID-19, according to the 2020 SRE Survey Report from Catchpoint and the DevOps Institute.

Google says SREs should be doing 50% ops work and 50% dev work, yet having a 50/50 workload split seems to be a pipe dream, according to the survey. The majority of respondents are currently spending 75% of their time on operations resulting in far less of their time being devoted to development.

Additionally, 53% of respondents said they were being involved too late in the application lifecycle.

When SREs are invited early into the development process, organizations can mature to more advanced observability resulting in improved service reliability, incident management effectiveness and customer satisfaction.

"Solving complex problems and ensuring reliability in today's highly distributed world can be very difficult and requires greater monitoring and true observability. Prior to the pandemic, most companies had a handle on end-user/customer experience monitoring for distributed systems," said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint. "But now with a greater distribution of users comes new challenges and added reliability needs. True observability is the key to ensure reliability and customer experiences for all things distributed."

Jayne Groll, CEO, DevOps Institute, added: "SRE is one of the most innovative approaches to managing services since the early days of ITIL and is most closely aligned with the principles and practices of Agile and DevOps. The data in this report supports the rising criticality of both SRE as a practice and Site Reliability Engineer as a role for any organization trying to adapt to the digital age."

Highlights of survey results include:

Observability Components Exist - Observability Does Not

When asked what tool categories SREs are using today, the majority (93 percent) chose monitoring as compared with 53 percent choosing observability.

Additionally, when asked about their key responsibilities, the majority ignored those aligned with the observability pillars (events, metrics and tracing) highlighting the lack of true observability.

True observability requires monitoring of external outputs to determine how reliable internal systems function.

Heavy Ops Work Load Comes at a Cost

DevOps appears to be in a tug of war, and Ops is winning in the SRE community with the pre-COVID survey showing that 75% said they are spending the majority of their time on Ops, resulting in increased costs of owning and maintaining systems.

Perhaps widening the gap, the survey showed that two and a half months into working from home, the survey results showed a net 10% increase in Ops related responsibilities.


Challenges of the Shift to Remote Work

The post-pandemic environment has resulted in a major shift on where SREs will be located, with nearly 50% of SREs believing they will be working remotely post COVID-19, as compared to only 19% prior to the pandemic.

Additionally, 9% of respondents felt incident management has improved.

However, there are cautionary findings for organizations considering the structure of SRE teams post-COVID, as many respondents noted they are dealing with the following challenges:

■ 41% state that half or more of their work is a toil with mostly manual, repetitive, and tactical jobs that could be automated.

■ 52% said they spent too much time debugging

■ More than half of respondents felt that personal challenges included staying focused and having a good work/life balance while working from home

Recommendations for the SRE

Below are a few recommendations for SREs based on the survey's findings:

■ Be sure to include consideration for not only your code, but also the networks, third party services, and delivery chain components, to evaluate how well the three observability pillars are applied through this new digital experience observability lens.

■ Work to be included earlier in the development process should shift reliability further left to reduce cost, increase team alignment, and identify constraints that can be removed.

■ Turn newly surfaced, or previously-ignored challenges into strategic differentiators. Focusing on challenges like morale, employee experience, work/life balance, and employee engagement and sentiment may showcase a company's employee-first mentality to attract or retain top talent.

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

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For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

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Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

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For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

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Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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