Sumo Logic unveiled the results of the Global SRE Pulse 2022, a survey of insights from the global IT community, which highlights the growing adoption of SRE as a central operating model to deliver digital services and applications. The survey was conducted by DevOps Institute to establish a baseline on the current state of SRE in practice.

"With the explosion of digital services, SRE has rapidly evolved to become an essential collaboration center across development and operations teams to deliver digital experiences," said Bruno Kurtic, Founding VP of Product & Strategy, Sumo Logic. "The Global SRE Pulse demonstrates that in this modern age, the SRE model adds even greater value to application performance management and observability programs. SREs have emerged as a specialized group poised to seize on the next opportunity and drive growth."

Read the Global SRE Pulse 2022 here.

SRE: Are We There Yet?

Daily life is filled with the use of digital experiences powered by digital services. Over the course of the pandemic, enterprises have shifted to deliver even more services for health, video communications and financial livelihood as virtual and hybrid work models have taken shape. All of this drives digital transformation and the accelerated pace shows no signs of slowing down. To keep pace with this needed transformation, organizations have turned to SRE to anchor enhanced digital experiences.

It is no surprise that respondents to the Global SRE Pulse cite that the adoption of SRE is in full swing, with a resounding 62% of respondents reporting that their organizations employ SRE processes today. When asked how their enterprises are leveraging SRE: 

• 19% are applying SRE throughout the IT organization;
• 55% are using SRE within specific teams, products or services;
• 23% are currently piloting SRE; and 
• Two percent of respondents selected "other" and only one percent of organizations tried to apply SRE, but it didn't work.
  

"The adoption of SRE is also helping to create new experiences so that digital transformation can take place even faster. This research has proven it - SRE has become an essential engineering function and it should be considered a standard for any business to succeed in the digital age," said Eveline Oehrlich, Chief Research Officer, DevOps Institute.

Harnessing the Power of SRE: Adoption and Tools

According to the Global SRE Pulse, organizations adopt SRE for a variety of reasons. Reliability and security are top of mind, including the need to reduce the risk of service failure and unplanned downtime (68%), improve the ability to compete with improved reliable services and offerings (65%), and ensure satisfaction with business team partners because the frequency and severity of incidents are reduced (59%).

While SRE adoption is strong and growing, the challenge still lies in applying automation tools and techniques across domains and data silos. Respondents state that they are currently implementing the following top automation tools within the SRE team: ITSM/ticketing systems (30%), observability (29%), monitoring and performance management (29%), configuration management (29%), release management (27%), and security tools (26%).  

Observability solutions offer SRE teams the visibility needed to garner necessary insights into complex architecture and software stacks. Today, SRE teams are currently or continuously using the classic approach to monitoring: application performance monitoring (79%), availability, uptime and performance monitoring (86%), and synthetic transaction monitoring (60%).

Respondents to the Global SRE Pulse also state they are currently implementing other types of monitoring, including web performance (25%), real user monitoring (24%), security (24%) and business activity monitoring (23%). 

"As application modernization continues to accelerate, SREs are under more pressure to release faster," continued Kurtic. "This requires organizations to manage services across performance, security and reliability metrics. As SRE takes hold, we expect to see the additional removal of various silos for faster remediation and collaboration."