SRE/DevOps Toil Measurement & Automation Gap Analysis

Welcome to the SRE/DevOps Toil & Automation Survey. This survey asks about your experience with operational toil, automation, and reliability tooling over the last 30 days. It should take approximately 12 minutes to complete. Your participation is voluntary and you may stop at any time. There are no right or wrong answers—we are interested in your honest experience. All responses are confidential and will be reported only in aggregate. Please click next to begin.

What is your primary role?

• SRE / Production Engineer
• Platform / Infrastructure Engineer
• Software Engineer
• DevOps Engineer
• Engineering Manager
• Other (please specify)

In the last 30 days, which activities consumed the most of your working time? Select up to 3.

• Project / feature work
• Incident response / on-call
• Maintenance / operations changes
• CI/CD and deployments
• Troubleshooting / bug fixing
• Meetings / coordination
• Documentation / runbooks
• Repetitive manual tasks

Which tooling do you actively use to manage reliability and reduce toil? Select all that apply.

• Alerting / Monitoring (e.g., Prometheus, Datadog)
• Incident management (e.g., PagerDuty, Opsgenie)
• Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi)
• Configuration management (e.g., Ansible, Chef)
• CI/CD orchestration (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions)
• Feature flags / progressive delivery
• SLO / Error budget tooling
• Runbooks / ChatOps automation
• Change management (e.g., ServiceNow)
• Internal developer portal (e.g., Backstage)
• Chaos / Resilience testing
• None of the above
• Other (please specify)

Roughly how many incidents with user impact did your team experience in the last 30 days?

• 0
• 1–2
• 3–5
• 6–10
• 11–20
• 21+
• Not sure / Don't track

What single tooling change would most reduce toil for your team?

How many years have you worked in this type of role?

• 0–1
• 2–4
• 5–7
• 8–10
• 11+

Thank you for completing this survey. Your input helps us track toil patterns and prioritize the right reliability tooling investments. Results will be shared in aggregate only.

How often do you take on-call rotations?

• Never
• Ad hoc / occasionally
• Weekly
• Every 2 weeks
• Monthly
• Less often than monthly

In the last 30 days, approximately how many hours per week did you spend on repetitive manual tasks?

• 0 hours
• 1–3 hours
• 4–7 hours
• 8–12 hours
• 13–20 hours
• More than 20 hours

Overall, how automated are your common operations tasks today?

Compared to 3 months ago, how has your median time to resolve incidents changed?

• Improved (decreased)
• About the same
• Worsened (increased)
• Not sure / Don't track

What are the biggest blockers to automating more of your operations work next quarter?

Approximately how large is your organization?

• 1–49 employees
• 50–249
• 250–999
• 1,000–4,999
• 5,000–19,999
• 20,000+

In the last 30 days, which were your main sources of toil? Select up to 5.

• Noisy or flaky alerts
• Manual deployments
• Brittle CI/CD pipelines
• Environment drift or config mismatch
• Access or permissions requests
• Manual change approvals
• Capacity management chores
• Ticket handoffs or coordination
• Limited observability or telemetry gaps
• Flaky tests
• Rollback or roll-forward complexity
• Data migrations or backfills
• Tooling integrations or gaps
• Other (please specify)

How effective are your current tools for monitoring and alerting?

During your most significant incident in the last 30 days, what added the most toil?

• Paging noise or alert confusion
• Manual runbook steps
• Access or permissions delays
• Coordination or hand-off overhead
• Rollback or roll-forward complexity
• Limited data or observability gaps
• Change approvals or governance delays
• No significant incidents in the last 30 days

Based on your responses in this survey, please share any additional thoughts or feelings about toil, reliability, or tooling that we didn't cover.

Approximately how large is your SRE/Platform team?

• 1
• 2–5
• 6–10
• 11–20
• 21+

Rank the following by how disruptive they are to your focused engineering time (1 = most disruptive).

1. Noisy alerts / pages
2. Manual deployments
3. Access / permissions requests
4. Environment setup / configuration
5. Manual change approvals
6. Capacity / infrastructure changes

How effective are your current tools for deployment and CI/CD?

Which region best describes your primary working time zone?

• Americas
• EMEA
• APAC
• Other / Multiple

How effective are your current tools for incident management and response?

What is your work location model?

• Remote
• Hybrid
• Onsite

How effective are your current tools for infrastructure provisioning and configuration?

How effective are your current tools for change management and approvals?

Approximately how many manual steps did you automate or remove from runbooks in the last 30 days?

• 0
• 1–5
• 6–15
• 16–30
• 31+