Imagine this: You push a major update to your website, confident that everything looks great. Hours later, traffic plummets. Your users complain about slow load times, but when you check WebPageTest, everything seems fine. What’s missing? Real-time insights and proactive monitoring.

As someone who's been in the tech space for years, I've seen the evolution of user expectations and the way businesses have adapted to the digital world. What strikes me most today is how fast things have to move. I remember a time when uptime alone was the key to a successful service. Today, it’s no longer enough for a service to just be “up”—it needs to be fast, seamless, and reliable at all times.

Do you remember Back to the Future Day? The day in 2015 when the world celebrated Marty McFly’s trip to a futuristic 2015 in the iconic movie? We laughed at the idea of hoverboards and self-tying shoes while marveling at how much of what was once science fiction was becoming real. Here’s the thing, though: the future never announces its arrival with a neon sign or a ringing bell. It just happens.

The SRE Report is now seven years old. I’ve had the honor and privilege of authoring it for the last five years. This 2025 version included working with some amazing individuals like Kurt Andersen and Denton Chikura. My heartfelt thanks go to them for shouldering the weight of what is both a labor of love and an often daunting, procrastination-inducing marathon of analysis.

Gartner recently published the first ever Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). This landmark report raises important questions about what DEM is and why we need a new category now. It also prompts discussions about how DEM, Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM), and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) relate to each other and what roles they play in modern monitoring strategies.

This was an important year for our industry. On one side, digital transformation efforts continue to make almost every business process and almost every human process digital, which means dependent on the internet. Almost every application, every system is cloud-centric, service-oriented, and composed of multiple geographically dispersed services. The Internet is fragile, complex, and constantly changing.

The recent ServiceNow Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate error disrupted operations for hundreds of organizations causing widespread connectivity failures. IT operations stalled, developers hit roadblocks, and businesses across industries felt the impact. The culprit? An expired SSL certificate. While these disruptions highlight the importance of SSL monitoring, they point to a deeper issue: trust.

With the holiday shopping season in full swing, poor web performance can have a big impact on revenue. There’s intense competition for online shoppers, and customers will quickly bounce to another site instead of slogging through a bad experience. The best way to track and achieve your web performance goals is through experience-based SLOs (Experience Level Objectives, or XLOs).

Imagine you're on a website trying to purchase a product, but every time you click the "Add to Cart" button, nothing happens. Frustrating, isn’t it? Such moments can deter consumers from completing their online purchases. And while users find this annoying, it poses an even bigger challenge for businesses.