We have compiled a list of the most popular and sought out tools (some you may have heard of) that SREs need in their toolkit - at every phase of a production system to keep up with SRE best practices

Site reliability engineering (SRE) practices help organizations by ensuring smooth functioning of their deliverables with utmost reliability and resilience.

These can be achieved by a set of well-defined tools that are deployed at every phase of the production system to keep up with SRE best practices.

This blog identifies and lists the chain of top SRE tools and their significance towards ensuring reliability of the architecture.

How to Standardize SRE Practices with SRE Toolchain

Every organization would have its own order of practice in framing its infrastructure. So depending on how they build their architecture, the standardization of SRE tools would come into the picture. For example, a social networking architecture would focus on establishing high-level support facilities and easily scalable infrastructure. Hence they would rely on tools that center around cloud-native applications, DevOps, and CI/CD automation. Whereas on the other hand, an e-commerce platform would rely on application, data storage, and DevOps tools for building and maintaining its architecture in accordance with SRE practices.

Thus, by comparing and considering the basic requirements of every architecture, we have arrived at a set of SRE tool stack that can potentially help standardize SRE best practices.

SRE Toolchain and Top Tools Used by SREs in Each Category

1. Containers for Microservices and Orchestration Tools

Microservices are the kind of infrastructure that splits up the whole architecture (monolithic) into multiple individual logical functions or services. Containers play a vital role in gathering all the requirements (code, libraries, dependencies, binaries, etc.,) of microservices in one place to execute all their capabilities.

2. Source Control Tools

Source code is a vital element of cloud infrastructure. This main code has to be tracked, managed, and updated at once when any change is detected. This can be done with source control tools. These tools help the development team to embrace the changes in codebases. And ensures the source code is always updated for the effective functioning of the systems and infrastructure.

Git is a widely-used open source and free distributed version control system. Git is generally adopted by organization of all sizes for updating their source code and storing them across GitHub.

3. Continuous integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) Tools

Continuous integration is the automatic testing practice of every change that has been affected on the source code. And continuous deployment follows continuous integration by pushing the tested codebase to the production environment. Here are few tools that can help in executing these functions,

4. Data Storage tools

Data is key ingredient to every digital business. It also forms an important asset that helps businesses in easing the decision-making process. As SRE metrics are framed upon system performance data, this has to be carefully stored in the best-suited and easy to access interface. Below are a set of tools that could greatly help in data storage and processing.

5. Configuration Management Tools

Configuration management is the process of tracking and controlling all the changes (configuration, identification, and implementation) that are made to a software product. These tools detect any unauthorized changes and control the implementation of changes across software solutions.

6. Monitoring and Observability Tools

Monitoring and observability are two main functions in maintaining system health. SREs work closely with these monitoring tools. The prime role of site reliability engineers is to develop custom queries across alert managers that are present inside the monitoring tools’ architecture. These functions check whether all the system functionalities are working as expected. And helps to generate alerts when there is any deviation in system behavior.

Metrics Collection Tools

Log Aggregation Tools

Distributed Tracing Tools

Application Performance Monitoring Tools

7. Dashboarding Tools

Dashboarding tools help SREs to scrutinize issues more efficiently by displaying all the necessary data (Key Performance Indicators and Critical data points) in one screen. These tools facilitate pictorial or graphical representation of system data, thereby giving precise information about the system's health.

8. Incident Management / On-call Alerting System Tools

An incident management tool is an essential part while managing system architecture. These tools sit on top of all the monitoring/error tracking/logging applications and direct all the incoming system alerts to specific internal services to initiate the recovery processes.

Conclusion

While choosing the right tools when building your SRE toolchain, there’s no “one-size-fits-all” set of tools.The tools SREs use at any given time will depend on where an organization is in their SRE journey. Organizations at the beginning or initial stages of their SRE journey will tend to use more specialised operations tools as opposed to more mature organizations. That said, SRE teams will experiment and adapt the right tools as they continue on their journey to seek new, efficient ways to bring more reliability to everything they do.

Regardless of the kind of platform you are running, we are sure that the tools listed here will be useful to you. On similar lines, for a more detailed look at the top observability tools used by DevOps/SREs, head over to this blog.

Squadcast is an incident management tool that’s purpose-built for SRE. Your team can get rid of unwanted alerts, receive relevant notifications, work in collaboration using the virtual incident war rooms, and use automated tools like runbooks to eliminate toil.