SRE/DevOps Toil Measurement & Automation Gap Analysis
Quantifies toil sources, automation maturity, and incident-resolution quality for SRE, platform, and DevOps teams over a 30-day period. Use to benchmark reliability operations and prioritize tooling investments.
What's Included
AI-Powered Questions
Intelligent follow-up questions based on responses
Automated Analysis
Real-time sentiment and insight detection
Smart Distribution
Target the right audience automatically
Detailed Reports
Comprehensive insights and recommendations
Template Overview
27
Questions
AI-Powered
Smart Analysis
Ready-to-Use
Launch in Minutes
This professionally designed survey template helps you gather valuable insights with intelligent question flow and automated analysis.
Sample Survey Items
Q1
Chat Message
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 6–8 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.
Q2
Multiple Choice
What is your primary role?
SRE / Production Engineer
Platform / Infrastructure Engineer
Software Engineer
DevOps Engineer
Engineering Manager
Other (please specify)
Q3
Multiple Choice
How often do you take on-call rotations?
Never
Ad hoc / occasionally
Weekly
Every 2 weeks
Monthly
Less often than monthly
Q4
Multiple Choice
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
Q5
Dropdown
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
Q6
Multiple Choice
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)
Q7
Ranking
Rank the following by how disruptive they are to your focused engineering time (1 = most disruptive).
Drag to order (top = most important)
Noisy alerts / pages
Manual deployments
Access / permissions requests
Environment setup / configuration
Manual change approvals
Capacity / infrastructure changes
Q8
Multiple Choice
Which tooling do you actively use to manage reliability and reduce toil? Select all that apply.
Overall, how automated are your common operations tasks today?
Range: 1 – 7
Min: Not at all automatedMid: NeutralMax: Fully automated
Q10
Opinion Scale
How effective are your current tools for monitoring and alerting?
Range: 1 – 7
Min: Not at all effectiveMid: NeutralMax: Extremely effective
Q11
Opinion Scale
How effective are your current tools for deployment and CI/CD?
Range: 1 – 7
Min: Not at all effectiveMid: NeutralMax: Extremely effective
Q12
Opinion Scale
How effective are your current tools for incident management and response?
Range: 1 – 7
Min: Not at all effectiveMid: NeutralMax: Extremely effective
Q13
Opinion Scale
How effective are your current tools for infrastructure provisioning and configuration?
Range: 1 – 7
Min: Not at all effectiveMid: NeutralMax: Extremely effective
Q14
Opinion Scale
How effective are your current tools for change management and approvals?
Range: 1 – 7
Min: Not at all effectiveMid: NeutralMax: Extremely effective
Q15
Dropdown
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+
Q16
Dropdown
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
Q17
Multiple Choice
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
Q18
Multiple Choice
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
Q19
Long Text
What single tooling change would most reduce toil for your team?
Max chars
Q20
AI Interview
What are the biggest blockers to automating more of your operations work next quarter?
AI InterviewLength: 3Personality: [Object Object]Mode: Fast
Reference questions: 5
Q21
Long Text
Based on your responses in this survey, please share any additional thoughts or feelings about toil, reliability, or tooling that we didn't cover.
Max chars
Q22
Multiple Choice
How many years have you worked in this type of role?
0–1
2–4
5–7
8–10
11+
Q23
Multiple Choice
Approximately how large is your organization?
1–49 employees
50–249
250–999
1,000–4,999
5,000–19,999
20,000+
Q24
Multiple Choice
Approximately how large is your SRE/Platform team?
1
2–5
6–10
11–20
21+
Q25
Multiple Choice
Which region best describes your primary working time zone?
Americas
EMEA
APAC
Other / Multiple
Q26
Multiple Choice
What is your work location model?
Remote
Hybrid
Onsite
Q27
Chat Message
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.
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