Rootly | Site Reliability Engineering Tools: Build vs Buy in 2025

Site reliability engineering tools have become essential infrastructure components as organizations increasingly depend on digital service delivery. The strategic decision between building custom site reliability engineering tools or purchasing commercial solutions directly impacts system reliability, operational efficiency, and long-term technology costs.

This comprehensive analysis examines the build vs buy framework for site reliability engineering tools, providing technical insights and practical guidance for engineering leaders navigating these critical infrastructure decisions.

The Strategic Importance of Site Reliability Engineering Tools

88% of SREs say there is now more understanding of the strategic importance of their role than there was three years ago. [1] This recognition reflects the critical role that site reliability engineering tools play in maintaining competitive advantage through reliable digital services.

Site reliability engineers (SREs) play a crucial role in maintaining the reliability, performance, and scalability of production systems. To achieve these goals, SREs rely on a variety of tools that fall into several categories, including monitoring/observability, on-call and incident management, and configuration, and automation. [2]

Enterprise Adoption and Market Evolution

As more organizations adopt cloud-based computing and the demand for digital services increases, site reliability engineering (SRE) practices have become essential. These practices help organizations meet service level agreements (SLAs) for availability, performance, user experience, and business KPIs. [3]

The complexity of maintaining these systems continues to increase. The Dynatrace 2022 Global CIO Report found that 71% of top IT executives say the explosion of data produced by cloud-native technology stacks is beyond human ability to manage, and more than three-quarters say their IT environment changes once every minute or less. [4]

Understanding Site Reliability Engineering Tools Categories

Modern site reliability engineering tools encompass multiple interconnected categories that support the complete reliability engineering lifecycle:

Core Tool Categories

Monitoring and Observability Platforms We categorized these 10 tools for site reliability engineers into four groups: monitoring/observability, on-call and incident management, configuration and automation, and internal developer portals. Each of these tools provides SREs with the necessary capabilities to build robust incident responses, ensure and improve production readiness, and maintain high security and coding standards. By leveraging these tools, SREs can effectively monitor, automate, and manage their systems, ensuring that they meet the demands of modern infrastructure and application environments. [2]

Incident Management and Response Systems Google's approach to incident management demonstrates the architectural sophistication required in enterprise-grade systems. Google's incident response system, known as IMAG, is based on the Incident Command System (ICS), a US standard for responding to emergencies, such as wildfires or earthquakes. These systems focus on the "three Cs" (3Cs) of incident management: coordinate, communicate, and control. [5]

Automation and Infrastructure Orchestration 85% of organizations say their ability to scale SRE practices will be dependent on automation and AI capabilities. 71% of organizations are increasing the use of automation across every part of the lifecycle to reduce toil for developers and SREs. [1]

Strategic Decision Framework for Site Reliability Engineering Tools

Key Decision Factors

Technical Complexity and Integration Requirements The sophistication required for enterprise-grade site reliability engineering tools presents significant challenges for custom development. The main roles in Google's IMAG are Incident Commander (IC), Communications Lead (CL), and Operations Lead (OL). The IC coordinates the overall incident response. The CL provides regular updates to stakeholders and acts as a point of contact for incoming communications. This allows the OL to focus on mitigating the issue, minimize user impact, and resolving the problem. [5]

Resource Allocation and Opportunity Cost SREs currently dedicate the largest amount of their time to reducing MTTR (mean time to recovery) (67%), building and maintaining automation code (60%), and ensuring security vulnerabilities are detected and eliminated [1]. Organizations must evaluate whether internal development expertise is better allocated to custom tooling or core product innovation.

Time to Value and Business Impact Uptime Institute's 2022 Outage Analysis report found that over 60% of system outages resulted in at least $100,000 in total losses, up from 39% in 2019. More than one in seven outages cost more than $1 million. [4]

Build Option: Advantages and Challenges

Benefits of Building Custom Site Reliability Engineering Tools

Complete control over feature roadmap and architectural decisions
Perfect alignment with specific organizational workflows and requirements
Potential for competitive differentiation through unique capabilities
Deep integration with existing internal systems and processes

Build Option Challenges Organizations face significant challenges when building custom site reliability engineering tools. There are now more than 1,000 solutions in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) landscape, which is far too many for any single developer or team to manage. As a result, different software development tribes are emerging, with pockets of knowledge and tooling specialties and preferences. This makes it impossible to apply a standard approach to observability, automation, self-healing, and vulnerability management which is required to drive reliability across the development lifecycle. [6]

Additional build challenges include:

Significant upfront development investment and ongoing maintenance costs
Risk of knowledge silos and technical debt accumulation
Extended time to achieve production-ready functionality
Competition with product development for engineering resources

Buy Option: Commercial Solutions

Advantages of Commercial Site Reliability Engineering Tools

Rapid deployment and immediate time to value
Proven reliability patterns and industry best practices
Professional support and regular feature updates
Reduced operational overhead and maintenance burden

Self-service observability and monitoring-as-code capabilities are key, allowing development teams to build feedback loops into their applications in just a few clicks. Through this, SREs will lead the charge in going beyond basic automation to smart orchestration of customer experience and business outcomes. That will empower organizations to drive digital transformation faster than ever, through self-healing cloud applications that quickly scale with business needs. As a result, SREs can be free to focus on the things that are core to their role, enabling them to create greater value by driving best practices for reliability, resiliency, security, and performance, to ultimately deliver better business outcomes. [1]

Commercial Solution Considerations

Licensing costs that scale with usage and organizational size
Potential vendor lock-in and reduced customization flexibility
Dependency on vendor roadmap for capability enhancements
Integration challenges with existing internal systems

Rootly: Leading the Site Reliability Engineering Tools Market

Rootly represents the optimal commercial solution for organizations prioritizing incident management excellence. The platform demonstrates how sophisticated site reliability engineering tools can deliver immediate business value while reducing operational complexity.

Rootly's Technical Excellence

AI-Native Architecture for Enhanced Automation Rootly has implemented the Agents JSON standard, ensuring that LLM agents can interact with its API to the full extent, including complex requests that agents could not perform natively. This enables Rootly customers to perform more intelligent and autonomous incident management via their AI-powered automation tools and co-pilots. [7]

Rapid Implementation and Deployment From sign-up to first incident in under 5 minutes. Seriously. This deployment velocity demonstrates the immediate time-to-value advantage that distinguishes commercial solutions from custom development approaches.

Industry-Proven Best Practices Best practices based on how 100's of customers setup everything from Slack to Jira and packaged it into opinionated smart defaults. Let Rootly handle the heavy lifting in educating new incident responders.

Comprehensive Workflow Automation Rootly's automation capabilities address the full incident lifecycle: Looping in the right teams/responders and assign roles (e.g. Commander) Setting reminders and tasks (e.g. updating executive team every 30min) Communication with stakeholders (e.g. Statuspage, Slack, Email) Automated postmortem timeline generation and action item tracking [8]

Enterprise-Grade Reliability Rootly On-Call, for example, is the only alerting solution offering multi-cloud redundancy. That means even if AWS has an outage, you still won't miss a single alert.

Cost Analysis and ROI Framework

Total Cost of Ownership Analysis

Build Option Cost Structure

Initial development costs (6-18 months of engineering time)
Ongoing maintenance and feature development expenses
Infrastructure and operational costs
Opportunity cost of diverted engineering resources
Training and knowledge transfer investments

Buy Option Cost Structure

Subscription licensing fees scaled to organizational requirements
Implementation and integration development costs
Training and change management expenses
Potential cost savings from reduced engineering overhead

Quantifying Business Impact

Organizations implementing effective site reliability engineering tools report substantial operational improvements. IT environments are now too complex to manage without automation and AI. Without these capabilities, achieving five-nines availability will become close to impossible. [4]

The business impact extends beyond technical metrics. With so many of their transactions occurring online, customers are becoming more demanding, expecting websites and applications to always perform perfectly. One recent report found that 32% would leave their favorite brand after just one bad experience. [4]

Technical Implementation Considerations

Integration Architecture Requirements

Modern site reliability engineering tools must integrate seamlessly with diverse technology stacks and operational workflows. 68% of SREs say siloed teams and multiple tools make it difficult to align on a single version of 'the truth' about service levels. [1]

Automation and Orchestration Capabilities

Where possible, automating elements of incident response will free the oncallers to focus on problem solving. This can include automation of common tasks, automated analysis of key impact information (severity, affected services/locations, etc), root cause analysis, and intelligent suggestion of mitigating actions the oncaller can take. [5]

Commercial platforms like Rootly provide these automation capabilities immediately, while custom solutions require substantial development investment to achieve equivalent functionality.

Service Level Management

99% of SREs encounter challenges when defining and creating SLOs to evaluate service levels for applications and infrastructure. The most common challenges include: [1] the complexity of distributed system monitoring and the need for unified visibility across multiple service dependencies.

Future-Proofing Site Reliability Engineering Tools Decisions

Technology Evolution and Market Trends

By 2025, 85% of SREs want to standardize on the same observability platform from Dev to Ops and security. [9] This convergence toward unified platforms favors comprehensive commercial solutions over fragmented custom tools.

AI Integration and Advanced Automation

The integration of artificial intelligence into site reliability engineering tools represents a significant advancement in operational capability. Organizations are primarily using automation in SRE to resolve security vulnerabilities (61%), and application failures (57%), increase the speed of delivery (56%), and predict SLO violations before they occur (55%). SREs say AIOps will enable teams to automate more processes critical to ensuring service levels are continually met (64%), prioritize problems that have the biggest impact on user satisfaction (63%), and prioritize secur [1]

Decision Matrix and Evaluation Framework

Strategic Assessment Criteria

Organizations should evaluate site reliability engineering tools decisions based on multiple strategic dimensions:

Business Criticality: How essential is rapid incident response to business operations and revenue protection?
Technical Complexity: What level of customization and integration sophistication is required?
Resource Availability: Does the organization possess sufficient engineering expertise for sustainable custom development?
Time Constraints: How rapidly must the solution become operational and deliver business value?
Scalability Requirements: What are the projected growth patterns and expansion needs?

When to Build Custom Site Reliability Engineering Tools

Consider building custom solutions when:

Unique business requirements cannot be addressed by existing commercial solutions
Significant competitive advantage can be achieved through proprietary capabilities
Sufficient engineering resources are available without impacting core product development
Long-term control over tool evolution is strategically essential
Integration requirements with legacy systems are highly specialized

When to Buy Commercial Site Reliability Engineering Tools

Commercial solutions are optimal when:

Rapid deployment is critical for business operations and risk mitigation
Industry-standard functionality adequately meets organizational requirements
Engineering resources are better allocated to core product development and innovation
Ongoing maintenance and support overhead should be minimized
Proven reliability and vendor support are essential for business continuity

Implementation Best Practices

For Organizations Selecting Commercial Solutions

Comprehensive Evaluation Process

Conduct thorough proof-of-concept evaluations using realistic production scenarios
Assess integration capabilities with existing technology stacks and workflows
Evaluate vendor reliability, support quality, and long-term viability
Consider product roadmap alignment with organizational strategic objectives

Strategic Implementation Approach Organizations should prioritize solutions like Rootly that demonstrate enterprise-grade capabilities and rapid deployment. If you need people to go through "PagerDuty University" (50+ corporate videos) just to get a push notification, you're probably not making the best use of everybody's time.

For Organizations Choosing Custom Development

Development Strategy and Risk Mitigation

Begin with minimum viable product focusing on core incident response capabilities
Establish clear architectural patterns following proven industry standards
Implement comprehensive testing and validation procedures throughout development
Plan for long-term maintenance, documentation, and knowledge transfer protocols

Conclusion

The build vs buy decision for site reliability engineering tools in 2025 requires systematic evaluation of technical requirements, resource constraints, and strategic business objectives. While building custom solutions offers maximum control and potential differentiation, the complexity and ongoing maintenance requirements typically favor commercial platforms.

"Reliability, experience, and security have become critical success factors in a world where every second of downtime leads to lost revenue, declining share prices, and lasting reputational damage," said Bernd Greifeneder, Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Dynatrace. "This makes SRE central to driving faster digital transformation. [1]

For most organizations, commercial solutions like Rootly provide the optimal balance of functionality, reliability, and time-to-value. The platform's AI-native architecture, comprehensive automation capabilities, and industry-proven practices enable teams to focus on core business objectives while maintaining exceptional system reliability.

SRE works best when reliability becomes everyone's concern, not just the SRE team's. Give development teams tools, training, and incentives to make reliable systems.

Organizations must align their site reliability engineering tools strategy with broader digital transformation objectives, ensuring that tooling decisions support both immediate operational requirements and long-term scalability needs. The decision between building and buying should ultimately serve the organization's capacity to deliver reliable, scalable digital services that meet customer expectations and drive business success.

Ready to transform your incident management capabilities with enterprise-grade site reliability engineering tools? Schedule a demo with Rootly to discover how their AI-native platform can accelerate your organization's reliability engineering maturity and operational excellence.

Citations

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How Motive achieves 99.99% reliability with Rootly

Site Reliability Engineering Tools: Build vs Buy in 2025