DevOps Reliability & Incident Response Assessment
Benchmarks uptime, incident response, on-call burden, error handling, and SLA priorities across engineering teams. Designed for SREs, DevOps engineers, and software developers managing production systems.
Sample questions
A preview of what’s in the template. Every question is editable before you launch.
How often does your team deploy changes to production?
- Multiple times per day
- Daily
- Weekly
- Every 2 to 4 weeks
- Monthly or less
In the past 30 days, approximately how many user-impacting incidents did your team handle?
- 0
- 1–2
- 3–5
- 6–10
- 11–20
- More than 20
In the past 90 days, how often has your team experienced cascading failures or dependent-service outages?
How confident are you that error handling is robust across your team's critical user and system paths today?
Rank the following SLA/SLO dimensions by importance to your team, from most to least important.
- Availability (uptime %)
- Request latency targets
- Error rate / error budget
- Data freshness or latency targets
- Recovery time objective (RTO)
- Recovery point objective (RPO)
We'd like to explore your reliability and SLA experiences in a bit more depth. An AI moderator will ask you a couple of follow-up questions based on your earlier responses.
If you could trade performance or features for greater stability, what would you change first, and why?
What is your primary role?
- Software engineer (IC)
- Tech lead / Engineering manager
- SRE / DevOps / Platform engineer
- Data / ML engineer
- QA / Testing
- Architect
- Product manager
- Other
Thank you for completing this survey! Your input will help prioritize the reliability outcomes that matter most to engineering teams. All results will be reported in aggregate only.
Are you currently part of an on-call rotation for production services?
- Yes
- No
In the past 30 days, approximately how many pages or high-priority alerts did you personally receive?
- 0
- 1–5
- 6–15
- 16–30
- 31–60
- More than 60
In the past 90 days, how often has your team experienced degraded response times or latency spikes noticeable to users?
Overall, how useful are your production alerts during incidents?
How well does your team currently meet its primary SLA/SLO targets?
How many years of professional software experience do you have?
- 0–1
- 2–4
- 5–9
- 10–14
- 15+
Rank the following on-call pain points from most to least painful.
- Noisy or low-signal alerts
- Runbook gaps or outdated steps
- Slow debugging due to limited traces/logs
- Flaky deployments or rollbacks
- Third-party instability
In the past 90 days, how often has your team experienced deployment rollbacks or failed releases?
Please describe the most important error-handling gap you noticed in the past 90 days. What was its impact, and how was it addressed (if at all)?
Approximately how large is your company?
- 1–10
- 11–50
- 51–200
- 201–1,000
- 1,001–5,000
- 5,001+
In the past 90 days, how often has your team experienced data inconsistencies or silent failures?
Which industry best describes your organization?
- SaaS / B2B software
- Consumer internet
- Financial services / Fintech
- Healthcare / Life sciences
- Gaming
- Media / Entertainment
- Retail / E-commerce
- Industrial / IoT
- Government / Public sector
- Other
Where are you primarily located?
- North America
- Europe
- Asia-Pacific
- Latin America
- Middle East / Africa
What is the typical size of the team responsible for your primary service or system?
- 1–3
- 4–7
- 8–15
- 16+
What’s included
AI follow-ups
Adaptive probes on open-ended answers that pull out detail a static form would miss.
Attention checks
Built-in safeguards against rushed answers and low-quality respondents.
AI-drafted copy
Wording, ordering, and branching written by the AI — tuned to your research goal.
Auto report
Themes, quotes, and a plain-English summary write themselves once responses come in.
How it compares
We reviewed the closest templates from other survey tools. Here’s what they do well — and where this template goes further.
Why this template
- Goes beyond single-incident logging to benchmark team-wide reliability patterns: deployment frequency, on-call rotation status, 30-day incident and page/alert counts, and ranked on-call pain points.
- Uses opinion-scale questions to quantify 90-day frequency of cascading failures, degraded response times, rollbacks, and data inconsistencies, plus confidence in error handling and usefulness of alerts.
- Includes a dedicated AI follow-up interview that adaptively probes reliability and SLA experiences in more depth, alongside open-text questions on error-handling gaps and stability trade-offs.
- Captures ranked SLA/SLO priorities and role/company demographics (role, experience, company size, industry, location, team size), with automated per-response quality scoring and an auto-generated report — available on our free tier or $50/mo Business plan.
SurveySparrow
Manage IT Incident Reporting with Software Incident Report FormA conversational-style form for logging individual software incidents as they occur, not a broader survey benchmarking team reliability practices or SLA priorities. It's a fielding-ready template, but scoped to single-incident capture rather than aggregate assessment across engineers.
What it does well
- Conversational, one-question-at-a-time format that SurveySparrow is known for
- Quick to deploy for capturing individual incident details
- Likely integrates with SurveySparrow's broader survey/workflow tools
Where it falls short
- No adaptive AI follow-up interview to probe deeper into root causes or reliability practices
- No ranking or opinion-scale structure to benchmark on-call burden or SLA priorities across a team
- No automated quality scoring or auto-generated analytical report
Typeform
Software Incident Report Form TemplateA polished, static form for reporting a single software incident, useful for intake/logging but not designed to assess on-call burden, cascading failure frequency, or SLA/SLO priorities across a team. It's a ready-to-use template, but narrower in scope than a full reliability assessment.
What it does well
- Clean, mobile-friendly interface typical of Typeform
- Conditional logic support for routing incident details
- Easy to embed in internal tools or ticketing workflows
Where it falls short
- No voice AI or adaptive AI interview component to explore incident context beyond fixed fields
- No mechanism for benchmarking recurring patterns (cascading failures, rollback frequency) over a time window
- No transparent prompt methodology or automated report synthesis
Frequently asked questions
What questions are in the “DevOps Reliability & Incident Response Assessment” template?
The template includes 24 ready-to-use questions, starting with: “Welcome! Thank you for participating in this survey on DevOps reliability and incident response practices. This survey…” · “How often does your team deploy changes to production?” · “In the past 30 days, approximately how many user-impacting incidents did your team handle?”. The full set is previewed above, and every question is editable.
How long does this survey take to complete?
Respondents typically finish the 24 questions in about 11 minutes.
Can I customize this template?
Yes — every question, answer option, and the ordering is editable before you launch. You can add or remove questions, or ask the AI editor to rework the survey around your research goal.
Is this template free to use?
Yes. Open it in the editor and start customizing right away — no account required to try it, and the free plan covers launching your survey.
Ready to launch?
Open this template in the editor. Every part is yours to change before the first respondent sees it.
Related templates
More studies on similar topics.
Developer API Pricing & Willingness-to-Pay Research
Measures developer willingness to pay, pricing model preferences, and fairness perceptions for third-party APIs using Van Westendorp price sensitivity analysis and structured qualitative probes.
View templateSRE/DevOps On-Call Workload & Recovery Assessment
Measures on-call alert burden, interruption impact, recovery effectiveness, and compensation preferences across engineering teams to benchmark workload and identify actionable improvements to reduce burnout.
View templateEdge Computing Reliability & Incident Response Benchmark
Benchmarks edge SLO/SLA maturity, failure handling patterns, and release safeguards for DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering teams managing edge workloads.
View templateSRE/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.
View templateService Reliability & Pricing Transparency Assessment
Evaluates customer perceptions of service uptime, availability confidence, pricing clarity, and security trust. Designed for product and CX teams seeking actionable diagnostics on reliability and transparency pain points.
View templateIT SLA Compliance & Incident Handling Stakeholder Survey
Collects structured stakeholder feedback on SLA adherence, incident resolution quality, and improvement priorities over a 90-day window to identify service gaps and guide operational improvements.
View template