Best Site Reliability Engineering Tools DevOps Teams Swear By

Your production system just went down at 2 AM. Alerts are firing, customers are complaining on social media, and your on-call engineer is frantically trying to understand what's happening. Sound familiar?

This is exactly why site reliability engineers (SREs) play a crucial role in maintaining the reliability, performance, and scalability of production systems... SREs rely on a variety of tools that fall into several categories, including monitoring/observability, on-call and incident management, and configuration, and automation.

The difference between teams that recover quickly and those that struggle for hours often comes down to one thing: having the right site reliability engineering tools in place. Let's explore the essential tools that DevOps teams can't live without in 2025.

What Makes SRE Tools Essential?

SRE tools are a set of software applications that help site reliability engineers (SREs) manage and maintain complex software systems. These tools can be used to automate tasks, monitor system health, and respond to incidents.

But it's more than just having tools—it's about having the right combination that works together seamlessly. Automation frees up SREs to focus on more strategic initiatives, reducing the risk of human error and improving operational efficiency. Continuous monitoring provides real-time insights into system performance, enabling SREs to identify and resolve issues before they escalate. Effective alerting systems notify teams of potential problems promptly, allowing them to initiate timely and effective incident response procedures.

Monitoring and Observability Tools

Prometheus: The Open-Source Champion

Prometheus, an open-source monitoring system, excels at collecting and storing time-series data, providing a comprehensive view of system performance. Its efficient data storage and flexible querying capabilities make it a popular choice for SRE teams.

Key features:

• Granular metric collection from various sources, including applications, infrastructure, and services
• Flexible query language (PromQL)
• Built-in alerting capabilities
• Service discovery integration

Grafana: Visualization That Actually Helps

Grafana is an open-source, composable platform for monitoring and observability. It allows you to query, visualize, and analyze your metrics no matter where they are stored. Its powerful visualization capabilities make it an indispensable tool for SREs because of how much it can do — from gathering AI/ML insights to alert triggering and load testing. Aside from integrating with tools like Prometheus and 300 other popular platforms, Grafana enables you to create dashboards that provide real-time insights into system health and performance.

Datadog: Enterprise-Grade Monitoring

Datadog offers features such as APM (Application Performance Monitoring), log management, and security monitoring, making it a versatile tool for SREs to ensure production readiness. Datadog is a commercial monitoring and analytics platform for cloud-scale applications. It integrates with various services and tools, providing comprehensive visibility into the performance of applications and infrastructure.

New Relic: Comprehensive Application Intelligence

New Relic functions as a comprehensive monitoring platform that enables tracking of more than 780 different integrations between infrastructure monitoring and application performance along with log and vulnerability detection. The tool serves as an optimal selection for modern DevOps and SRE teams because it offers real-time analytics capabilities and automatic instrumentation and synthetic monitoring alongside cloud compatibility features.

Incident Management Software

When things go wrong—and they will—having robust incident management software can mean the difference between a minor blip and a major outage that costs your company thousands of dollars per minute.

Rootly: The Modern Incident Management Leader

Rootly stands out as the top choice for engineering teams looking to streamline their incident response process. The platform automates incident workflows, centralizes communication during outages, and provides post-incident analytics to prevent future failures.

Why teams choose Rootly:

• Automated incident detection and response workflows
• Centralized communication hub that keeps everyone aligned
• Post-incident analytics that actually help prevent future issues
• Seamless integrations with your existing DevOps toolchain
• Real-time status pages to keep stakeholders informed

Other Notable Players

Zenduty is a robust incident management platform which helps in enhancing the incident management process, offering features like automated alert handling and escalation policies.

Parity is an AI-driven Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) tool designed to enhance incident response processes. Acting as a first line of defense, Parity conducts automated investigations upon alert triggers, determining root causes and suggesting remediations before on-call engineers engage. This proactive approach reduces downtime and accelerates incident resolution, allowing engineering teams to maintain high service reliability with reduced manual intervention.

DevOps Automation Tools

Jenkins: The CI/CD Workhorse

Jenkins is an open-source automation server that supports building, deploying, and automating any project. Many continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines rely on Jenkins because it integrates with nearly every tool involved in CI/CD, making it both flexible and familiar. For SREs, Jenkins provides the ability to automate routine tasks and ensure that code changes are consistently and reliably tested and deployed. Its distribution models can also help SREs with load balancing and higher-level systems adjustments to improve service reliability.

Terraform: Infrastructure as Code Done Right

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that allows you to define and provision data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language. You can automate when and how you provision and manage infrastructure at the code level, ensuring consistency and reliability.

Essential Tools for On-Call Engineers

Being on-call doesn't have to be a nightmare. The right tools can make those 3 AM alerts manageable and even—dare we say it—somewhat predictable.

Nagios: Reliable Infrastructure Monitoring

Nagios operates as a reliable open-source tool for infrastructure monitoring that provides real-time alerts through customizable dashboards and multiple plugin selections. Enterprise-level network application and service monitoring operations prefer the tool because it operates on Windows Linux and macOS platforms.

Key Features On-Call Engineers Need:

Smart alerting systems that don't wake you up for non-critical issues Mobile-friendly dashboards so you can diagnose problems from anywhere Escalation policies that ensure the right person gets notified Integration capabilities with your existing monitoring stack Runbook automation to guide response actions

Configuration Management Tools

Configuration management tools enable consistent and controlled deployment of changes across environments, reducing the risk of configuration errors and ensuring system stability.

These tools help maintain consistency across your infrastructure and reduce the "it works on my machine" syndrome that can plague distributed systems.

How to Choose the Right SRE Tool Stack

When building your SRE toolkit, consider these factors:

Your current infrastructure maturity—don't over-engineer solutions for simple problems Team size and expertise—some tools require more specialized knowledge Budget constraints—open-source vs. commercial solutions Integration requirements—how well tools work together matters more than individual features Scalability needs—what works for 10 services might not work for 1,000

The Future of SRE Tooling

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) has grown from a buzzword to a core function in modern cloud-native organizations. With growing businesses, systems' reliability, performance, and scalability become a top priority. Amidst all this, the right set of tools and technologies become a critical consideration.

We're seeing exciting developments in AI-powered incident response, automated root cause analysis, and predictive failure detection. The tools that succeed will be those that reduce cognitive load on engineers while providing actionable insights.

Making It All Work Together

The best SRE teams don't just use great tools—they create workflows that connect these tools into a cohesive system. Your monitoring tools should automatically create incidents in your incident management platform. Your incident management system should integrate with your communication tools. Your post-incident reviews should feed back into your monitoring and alerting improvements.

That's where platforms like Rootly really shine. Instead of duct-taping together a dozen different tools, you get a unified incident management experience that plays nicely with your existing monitoring and DevOps infrastructure.

Ready to transform how your team handles incidents and maintains reliability? Consider starting with a solid incident management foundation—because when your systems are down, every second counts. Explore how Rootly can streamline your incident response and help your team focus on what they do best: building reliable systems that keep your customers happy.

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