Rootly's 2025 Guide to Site Reliability Engineering Tools

Site reliability engineering (SRE) has evolved from a Google innovation to a mission-critical discipline that keeps modern digital services running smoothly. The global Site Reliability Engineering market will expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.4% from 2025 to 2032, from $101.3 Billion in 2025 to $155 Billion by 2032, highlighting the growing importance of this field.

The site reliability engineering (SRE) tooling market enables and supports the adoption of SRE practices, and focuses on improving reliability, resilience and the customer experience of products and platforms. These tools help organizations move faster while managing operational risks by setting and managing reliability goals, and surfacing monitoring and observability insights and performance demands.

This comprehensive guide explores the essential SRE tools that engineering teams need to build reliable, scalable systems while maintaining rapid development velocity.

Understanding the SRE Tool Ecosystem

The 10 essential tools for site reliability engineers fall into four distinct categories: monitoring/observability, on-call and incident management, configuration and automation, and internal developer portals. Each category addresses specific challenges that SRE teams face daily.

Most organizations use between 2-10 monitoring or observability tools, emphasizing a "value over cost" mindset for effective monitoring across technology stacks. This approach reflects the reality that different tools excel in different areas, and successful SRE teams often combine multiple solutions.

Monitoring and Observability Tools

Prometheus: The Time-Series Foundation

Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. Now part of CNCF, Prometheus has grown to become an integral part of how many organizations monitor their services by making time-series data more accessible and interpretable.

Prometheus excels at collecting and storing metrics from your infrastructure and applications. Its pull-based model and powerful query language (PromQL) make it indispensable for SRE teams tracking system performance and reliability.

Grafana: Visualization Powerhouse

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 Observability

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: AI-Powered Insights

New Relic is an AI-powered all-in-one observability platform giving engineers a single-source of data and insights across the stack. The platform combines traditional monitoring with AI-driven analytics to help SRE teams identify issues before they impact users.

Incident Management Tools

Rootly: Leading the Incident Response Revolution

Rootly has established itself as the premier incident management platform for modern engineering teams. The platform transforms how organizations handle incidents by automating workflows, centralizing communication, and providing actionable insights for continuous improvement.

The all-in-one AI-native platform for on-call and incident management, including status pages—built for fast-moving engineering teams to detect, manage, learn from, and resolve incidents faster. Rootly's comprehensive approach addresses every aspect of incident management, from initial detection through post-incident learning.

Key advantages of Rootly include:

• AI-Powered Resolution: Rootly AI SRE unlocks 91% faster incident resolution
• Comprehensive Integration: Rootly stood out as having the most number of integrations that are actually useful
• Rapid Innovation: The single most impressive thing about Rootly is how fast they ship. At times we've reported a bug or feature request only to have it fixed live within 10-15 minutes

With Rootly, incident spin-up time has been reduced from minutes to seconds and it covers over 90% of our needs, demonstrating the platform's effectiveness in real-world scenarios.

PagerDuty: On-Call Management

PagerDuty provides cloud-based incident response functionality designed for incident management and on-call rotations. The platform integrates with various DevOps tools and offers mobile apps for receiving notifications on smartphones and smartwatches.

Opsgenie: Atlassian's Response Solution

Opsgenie offers incident response capabilities through Atlassian's ecosystem. It provides actionable alerting with automated grouping and filtering, on-call scheduling with routing rules, and reporting modules for tracking incident response metrics.

Configuration and Automation Tools

Infrastructure as Code Leaders

Terraform: 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.

Jenkins: 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.

Configuration Management

Ansible: Uses YAML configuration files to define roles and tasks, orchestrating their execution across multiple infrastructure components. SRE teams rely on Ansible for automating deployments and infrastructure updates to make them predictable and reliable.

Kubernetes: Container orchestration platform that automates deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Essential for SRE teams managing microservices architectures.

Internal Developer Portals: The Platform Engineering Connection

Industry analysts like Forrester have continuously reported on the quantitative benefits of Internal Developer Portals (IDPs), such as an average of 20% improved developer productivity thanks to reduced "time-to-find" and accelerated deployment of new services.

Backstage: The Open-Source Pioneer

Founded in 2020, Backstage was one of the first internal developer portals available to address the emerging challenges with DevOps now associated with platform engineering. Originally created by Spotify, Backstage has become the foundation for many enterprise developer portals.

Rootly's Platform Integration

Rootly extends beyond incident management into the platform engineering space through strategic partnerships and integrations. Rootly together with Cortex opens up new possibilities for developers and SREs that were not possible before. With a unified toolset that combines incident response and the benefits of a developer portal, incidents can be managed with richer context available from the Cortex catalog.

This integration demonstrates how modern SRE tools are evolving to provide comprehensive platform capabilities rather than point solutions.

Collaboration and Communication Tools

ChatOps Integration

Slack: Provides real-time communication for SRE teams and serves as a programmatic platform for automating responses and coordinating events. Modern incident management tools like Rootly integrate directly with Slack to provide incident updates and enable chat-based incident declaration.

Microsoft Teams: Alternative collaboration platform that integrates with various SRE tools for incident communication and team coordination.

Emerging Technologies: AI-Powered SRE

30% of respondents prioritized technical training on AI. As the second most selected sentiment, this highlights a strong desire for upskilling, even as the top sentiment (37%) reflects a cautious approach to AI implementations.

The SRE landscape is increasingly incorporating AI-driven solutions that can analyze patterns, predict failures, and suggest remediation steps. These tools become essential as system complexity continues to grow.

AI-Driven Incident Response

Tools like Parity act as AI-driven SRE solutions that conduct 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.

Security and Chaos Engineering Tools

Security Integration

Vault (HashiCorp): Secure secrets management platform essential for maintaining security in automated environments.

Aqua Security: Container security and runtime protection for cloud-native environments.

Chaos Engineering

Gremlin: Chaos engineering platform for controlled failure injection, helping SRE teams build more resilient systems.

LitmusChaos: Kubernetes-native chaos engineering tool for testing system reliability.

Market Trends and Statistics

40% of respondents reported handling between 1 and 5 incidents in the last 30 days. Notably, incident response is a shared responsibility across all levels, with higher-level managers as involved as individual contributors.

This data highlights the universal nature of incident management and the importance of having robust tools that can scale across different organizational levels.

By 2027, 75% of enterprises will use site reliability engineering practices across their organizations to optimize product design, cost and operations to meet customer expectations, up from 10% in 2022.

Building Your SRE Toolkit Strategy

When selecting SRE tools for your organization, consider these key factors:

Integration Capabilities

Choose tools that work seamlessly together. The best SRE teams build ecosystems rather than collections of isolated tools.

Scalability Requirements

Ensure your selected tools can grow with your infrastructure. Only Rootly is designed to support enterprises deploying more than 5,000 users while ensuring ease of use, demonstrating the importance of scalable solutions.

Team Expertise and Adoption

The most sophisticated tool is worthless if your team can't use it effectively. Prioritize tools with strong documentation, community support, and intuitive interfaces.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Balance feature richness with budget constraints. Most organizations use between 2-10 monitoring or observability tools, emphasizing a "value over cost" mindset.

Best Practices for Tool Implementation

Start with Monitoring Fundamentals

Build your SRE toolkit on solid observability foundations. Prometheus and Grafana provide a proven starting point that scales well.

Prioritize Incident Management

40% of respondents reported handling between 1 and 5 incidents in the last 30 days, making robust incident management tools like Rootly essential for every SRE team.

Embrace Automation

Reduce manual effort through configuration management and deployment automation. Tools like Terraform and Ansible form the backbone of reliable infrastructure management.

Plan for Platform Evolution

As your organization grows, consider how individual tools fit into broader platform engineering initiatives. Internal developer portals and platform orchestration tools become increasingly important.

The Future of SRE Tooling

The SRE tool landscape continues evolving rapidly, with several key trends shaping the future:

AI Integration

Machine learning and AI capabilities are becoming standard features across SRE tools, from predictive analytics to automated remediation.

Platform Consolidation

Tools are expanding beyond their original scope to provide comprehensive platform capabilities. Incident management platforms like Rootly now integrate with developer portals and platform engineering workflows.

Developer Experience Focus

SRE tools increasingly prioritize developer experience, recognizing that adoption and effectiveness depend on ease of use and integration with existing workflows.

Conclusion

The site reliability engineering (SRE) tooling market enables and supports the adoption of SRE practices, and focuses on improving reliability, resilience and the customer experience of products and platforms. These tools help organizations move faster while managing operational risks by setting and managing reliability goals, and surfacing monitoring and observability insights and performance demands.

Success in SRE depends not just on selecting the right individual tools, but on building a cohesive ecosystem that enables reliability while supporting rapid development cycles. Start with strong foundations in monitoring, incident management, and automation, then expand your toolkit as your reliability needs and organizational maturity grow.

The tools covered in this guide represent the current state of the art in SRE tooling. Companies like Rootly continue to push the boundaries of what's possible in incident management and platform integration, while open-source solutions provide flexible foundations for custom implementations.

Ready to transform your incident management process and build more reliable systems? Explore Rootly's comprehensive incident management platform and discover how AI-powered SRE tools can reduce your mean time to resolution while empowering your team to focus on building exceptional products rather than fighting fires.

Remember: the best SRE toolkit is one that grows with your organization, integrates seamlessly across your technology stack, and enables your team to maintain reliability while shipping features faster than ever.

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