SRE Tooling Checklist: DevOps Reliability 2025

Site reliability engineering and DevOps teams face unprecedented pressure to maintain system uptime while accelerating software delivery. As we progress into 2025, the cost of downtime, reputational damage and operational disruption has never been higher. Downtime costs organizations an average of $9,000 per minute.

The right tooling stack makes the difference between reactive firefighting and proactive reliability engineering. This comprehensive checklist covers the essential categories of SRE tools that modern DevOps teams need to ensure reliable operations at scale.

Best Incident Management Software for DevOps Teams

Incident management software forms the cornerstone of modern SRE practices. For teams practicing DevOps, the Incident Management (IM) process focuses on transparency and continuous improvements to the incident lifecycle.

Top DevOps Incident Management Platforms

Essential Features for DevOps Incident Management

DevOps incident management includes an explicit emphasis on involving developer teams from the beginning--including on call--and assigning work based on expertise, not job titles. Modern incident management software should include:

• Automated Incident Detection: Integration with monitoring tools to automatically trigger incidents when anomalies occur
• Collaborative Response Workflows: Use tools that create a record of the incident so anyone can jump in at any time and get up to speed on what's happened and what's being done
• Blameless Post-Mortems: Use the blameless approach After you've resolved the incident come together as a team to review what happened for a blameless postmortem session. Avoid finger-pointing and focus on sharing information that helps everyone do their jobs better and contributes to a more reliable system
• Status Page Integration: Automated external communication during incidents
• Mobile Accessibility: Critical for on-call engineers who need to respond from anywhere

Why Rootly Leads DevOps Incident Management

Rootly stands out as the premier incident management software for modern DevOps organizations. 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.

With Rootly, incident spin-up time has been reduced from minutes to seconds and it covers over 90% of needs. Key advantages include:

• AI-Powered Automation: By using AI, the SRE team at Google experienced a 50% increase in velocity when writing incident reports
• Multi-Cloud Redundancy: Rootly On-Call is the only alerting solution offering multi-cloud redundancy. That means even if AWS has an outage, teams still won't miss a single alert
• Slack-Native Operations: Automatically jump into a dedicated Slack channel and provide all relevant tools and responders in one place

The platform's flexibility sets it apart from rigid alternatives. Many products are very opinionated - they expect Incident Management flow to follow the flow and process that THEY define. Rootly can give teams an out-of-the-box template and opinions, but it also lets organizations customise almost everything. From forms and fields, workflows, integrations, it's all there to be as flexible as possible.

Site Reliability Engineering Tools: Monitoring and Observability

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.

Essential Site Reliability Engineering Tools Categories

These tools for site reliability engineers fall into four groups: monitoring/observability, on-call and incident management, configuration and automation, and internal developer portals.

Core Monitoring Platforms

Prometheus 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.

Grafana Grafana is an open-source, composable platform for monitoring and observability. It allows teams to query, visualize, and analyze metrics no matter where they are stored. Aside from integrating with tools like Prometheus and 300 other popular platforms, Grafana enables creation of dashboards that provide real-time insights into system health and performance.

Datadog 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 that integrates with various services and tools, providing comprehensive visibility into the performance of applications and infrastructure.

Advanced Observability Framework Implementation

Observability is the ability to understand a system's internal state by analyzing the data it generates, such as logs, metrics, and traces. The goal of observability is to understand what's happening across all environments and among technologies, so teams can detect and resolve issues to keep systems efficient and reliable.

Modern site reliability engineering tools must provide deep insights into distributed systems architecture, microservices dependencies, and cross-service transaction tracing for effective root cause analysis.

Best Tools for On-Call Engineers: Management and Scheduling

Effective on-call management prevents engineer burnout while maintaining system reliability. On-Call Management Tools are software applications designed to help software engineers, SREs, and DevOps teams manage and optimize their On-Call shifts. These tools enable teams to automate their On-Call management processes, track their On-Call response time, escalate incidents, and communicate with stakeholders.

Essential Features for On-Call Engineers

These On-Call Management tools help teams work more efficiently and effectively, ensuring they can respond quickly to incidents and maintain their systems' reliability and availability.

Advanced on-call management requires:

• Intelligent Scheduling: The typical best practice is to have junior engineers on the primary on-call rotation and schedule senior engineers as backup or secondary rotation. This helps junior engineers develop the required on-call skills while avoiding panic when there's an issue beyond their expertise.
• Multi-Layer Escalation Policies: The alert is automatically escalated to the next person in the on-call rotation, so nothing slips through the cracks. This ensures fast resolution, even if the primary on call engineer is unavailable during an incident.
• Context-Aware Mobile Notifications: Teams must employ an on-call management tool with persistent push notifications and override features that enable engineers to receive urgent messages instantly, whether or not phones are on silent. This helps engineers act fast, reduce downtime, and deliver effective incident response with no delays during high-pressure moments.

Top Tools for On-Call Engineers: Platform Comparison

Why Rootly Excels as the Best Tool for On-Call Engineers

Rootly provides industry-leading on-call management capabilities alongside its incident response platform. Teams can consolidate on-call and incident response under one roof.

Superior Mobile Experience for On-Call Engineers The interface is so beautiful engineers won't mind getting paged. Teams can ACK, escalate, bypass do not disturb and more from both iOS and Android. Engineers manage schedules, escalations, and PTO aware overrides without frustration, all within a beautiful intuitive interface that just makes sense

Advanced Automation Capabilities The platform delivers automated fair distribution of on-call responsibilities, seamless integration with existing monitoring tools, and AI-powered incident routing and escalation that reduces mean time to acknowledgment.

Automation and Configuration Management Tools

Automation and tooling: One of the core principles of SRE is reducing manual effort through automation. SREs develop scripts, CI/CD pipelines, and automated deployment systems to improve efficiency and reliability.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Tools

Terraform Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that allows teams to define and provision data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language. Teams can automate when and how they 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. 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.

Configuration Management Solutions

• Ansible: Agentless configuration management and automation
• Puppet: Configuration automation and compliance
• Chef: Infrastructure automation and configuration management

Chaos Engineering and Resilience Testing

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. Organizations increasingly adopt chaos engineering to proactively test system resilience and identify failure modes before they impact production.

Essential Chaos Engineering Tools

• Chaos Monkey: Random failure testing for high availability
• Gremlin: Chaos engineering platform for controlled failure injection
• LitmusChaos: Kubernetes-native chaos engineering

These tools enable teams to systematically introduce controlled failures, validate recovery procedures, and build confidence in system resilience through hypothesis-driven experimentation.

DevOps Incident Management Best Practices

Implementing an effective DevOps incident management process minimizes downtime, improves system reliability, and enhances operational efficiency.

Key Process Improvements for DevOps Teams

Early Detection and Prevention Early detection is crucial in preventing minor issues from escalating into major incidents. Recent data indicates that in 2024 the median time between system compromise and data exfiltration was just two days, underscoring the need for prompt detection mechanisms.

Automation-First Approach Leveraging automation tools can significantly reduce the time required to detect and resolve incidents. Automated monitoring systems can promptly identify anomalies, trigger alerts, and even initiate predefined remediation steps. By automating repetitive tasks, teams can focus on more complex issues requiring human intervention, improving overall efficiency.

Cross-Functional Collaboration Effective incident management and rapid recovery are essential for minimizing impacts, requiring a strategic approach that combines preparation, real-time troubleshooting and seamless team collaboration.

Measuring SRE Success with Advanced Metrics

Teams should track metrics such as mean time to detection (MTTD), mean time to repair (MTTR), and mean time between failures (MTBF) to understand their rate of improvement. These metrics help quantify the effectiveness of SRE tooling investments and identify areas for optimization.

Advanced SRE teams also monitor error budgets, service level indicators (SLIs), and customer-facing impact metrics to maintain reliability targets while enabling development velocity.

Transform Your SRE Operations with Rootly

Building an effective SRE toolchain requires selecting platforms that integrate seamlessly and reduce operational complexity. The best tools for on-call engineers and incident management software should work together to create a unified reliability engineering workflow.

Why Leading Organizations Choose Rootly

Organizations started focusing more on dedicated incident management solutions, like Rootly, FireHydrant, incident.io, and a few more. In the end, Rootly was the option that best met needs while providing the flexibility required as a high growth company. Working with Rootly feels like a partnership; as teams continued to use their tool and found more use cases, feature requests quickly found their way into their backlog.

Book a personalized demo with Rootly's reliability experts to see how the platform can modernize your incident management software, streamline your on-call processes, and transform your DevOps incident management workflows.

Start your free 14-day trial and experience why leading companies like NVIDIA, Squarespace, and Figma trust Rootly as their comprehensive site reliability engineering tool.

The future of SRE tooling lies in integrated platforms that reduce context switching, automate routine tasks, and empower engineers to focus on strategic reliability improvements. Organizations that adopt the best tools for on-call engineers and implement proven DevOps incident management practices achieve operational excellence while maintaining the agility needed for modern software delivery.