Catchpoint is proud to present the top SRE tools as voted on by SREs. In our fourth annual SRE Survey, compiled in partnership with VMware Tanzu Observability and DevOps Institute, we simply asked, “What are a few tools that every SRE should have available in their toolbelt?” Today, we are excited to share the findings with you. While some of the answers were not strictly tools, the analysis gives us valuable insight into the mindset of an SRE.

Facebook’s October 2021 outage was the type of event that gives SREs nightmares: A series of critical business apps crashed in minutes and remained unavailable for hours, disrupting more than 3.5 billion users around the world and costing about 60 million dollars. As incidents go, this was a pretty big one.

Looking into Incident Response? We explain incident response, the end-to-end process, the teams involved, and steps to take to avoid friction and slow-down. The goal is to manage the incident as efficiently as possible in order to restore or resume the service to its expected operational state.

In a world with everything digital, you need AIOps to help ensure uptime and break through the noise. Still not sold? Let's explore 5 ways SRE and DevOps teams are using AIOps to boost existing monitoring tools.

A site reliability engineer, or SRE, is a role that that encompasses aspects of both software engineering and operations/infrastructure. It also encompasses a strategy and set of practices and principles across service offerings and is closely tied to DevOps and operations. The term site reliability engineering first came into existence at Google in 2003 when a site reliability team was created. At that time, the team was made up of software engineers.

xMatters is part technology, part service reliability, and a little bit of magic. If you’ve spent time on the xMatters website, you’ll likely have seen a number of valuable use cases for the platform—it can alert SREs when there’s a website outage, it can accelerate product development for DevOps teams, it can manage on-call schedules and alerts for support teams.

The four key takeaways for SREs from Google’s State of DevOps 2021 report

If you're an engineer reading this, you might be wondering what I mean by the title. You might be a Site Reliability Engineer whose primary responsibility is to maintain the reliability of your company’s product/solution. You might be a software builder, a programmer responsible for building new capabilities and shipping them to production. All of these are important for any business to remain competitive.

Whether it's in classrooms or on Zoom calls, the kids have headed back to school! Bright-eyed students are gearing up to study new subjects and test their brains. Hopefully on their report cards, failure isn’t inevitable. Before the first day, parents load up their kids’ backpacks with everything they’ll need. Being well equipped with good supplies is the best way to stay focused and educate “reliably”. Likewise, SREs need the right tools and practices for the job.

At VMware, we make use of modern development and site reliability engineering (SRE) practices on a regular basis. And those of us who work on the VMware Tanzu Observability product marketing team regularly get exposure to various SRE teams that implement modern practices with the observability technology we create.