Intro
Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) play a crucial role in maintaining the reliability, performance, and scalability of production systems. To achieve these goals, Site Reliability Engineers rely on a variety of tools that fall into several categories, including monitoring/observability, on-call and incident management, and configuration and automation. Here, we discuss ten essential Site Reliability Engineer tools, including both open-source options and commercial solutions.
{{cta-demo}}
Monitoring/Observability Tools
1. Prometheus
Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. Since its inception, Prometheus has grown to be an integral part of the monitoring stack for many organizations.
Prometheus provides a powerful data model and query language (PromQL), allowing SREs to gain insights into system performance and reliability. It’s highly flexible and can be integrated with various exporters to collect metrics from different systems.
2. Grafana
Grafana is an open-source platform for monitoring and observability. It allows you to query, visualize, and understand your metrics no matter where they are stored. Grafana can be integrated with Prometheus, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, and many other data sources.
Grafana’s powerful visualization capabilities make it an indispensable tool for SREs. It enables the creation of dashboards that provide real-time insights into system health and performance.
3. Datadog
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.
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.
On-Call and Incident Management Tools
4. PagerDuty
PagerDuty is a commercial incident management platform that helps SREs manage and resolve incidents faster. It provides on-call scheduling, alerting, and escalation policies, ensuring that critical issues are addressed promptly.
PagerDuty’s integration with various monitoring tools allows for seamless incident detection and resolution, improving overall system reliability.
Configuration and Automation Tools
5. Jenkins
Jenkins is an open-source automation server that supports building, deploying, and automating any project. It is a widely used tool in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
For SREs, Jenkins provides the ability to automate routine tasks and ensure that code changes are consistently and reliably tested and deployed.
6. Ansible
Ansible is an open-source automation tool used for configuration management, application deployment, and task automation. It simplifies complex orchestration and configuration tasks.
Ansible's agentless architecture and easy-to-learn syntax make it a favorite among SREs for maintaining consistent environments and automating repetitive tasks.
7. 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.
Terraform's ability to manage infrastructure lifecycle, versioning, and modularity helps SREs automate the provisioning and management of infrastructure, ensuring consistency and reliability.
Internal Developer Portals
8. Port's Internal Developer Portal
Port's Internal Developer Portal provides a centralized hub for managing all aspects of software delivery and infrastructure. This tool helps SREs ensure production readiness by offering features such as service cataloging, deployment tracking, and automated compliance checks.
Port’s portal enhances collaboration between development and operations teams, ensuring that all standards are met and production environments are well-managed.
Additional essential tools
9. Nagios
Nagios is an open-source monitoring system that provides monitoring and alerting services for servers, switches, applications, and services. It helps SREs ensure that their infrastructure and applications are running smoothly.
Nagios offers a comprehensive suite of monitoring capabilities, including event handling, reporting, and an extensive plugin library, making it a versatile tool for maintaining system health.
10. New Relic
New Relic is a commercial observability platform that provides real-time insights into application performance and infrastructure. It offers APM, infrastructure monitoring, and synthetic monitoring to help SREs ensure production readiness.
New Relic's comprehensive monitoring capabilities and intuitive interface make it a valuable tool for identifying and resolving performance issues quickly.
Conclusion
These 10 tools for site reliability engineers, categorized into monitoring/observability, on-call and incident management, configuration and automation, and internal developer portals, provide SREs with the necessary capabilities to ensure production readiness and maintain high 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.
Check out Port's pre-populated demo and see what it's all about.
No email required
Contact sales for a technical product walkthrough
Open a free Port account. No credit card required
Watch Port live coding videos - setting up an internal developer portal & platform
Check out Port's pre-populated demo and see what it's all about.
(no email required)
Contact sales for a technical product walkthrough
Open a free Port account. No credit card required
Watch Port live coding videos - setting up an internal developer portal & platform
Book a demo right now to check out Port's developer portal yourself
Apply to join the Beta for Port's new Backstage plugin
It's a Trap - Jenkins as Self service UI
Further reading:
Example JSON block
Order Domain
Cart System
Products System
Cart Resource
Cart API
Core Kafka Library
Core Payment Library
Cart Service JSON
Products Service JSON
Component Blueprint
Resource Blueprint
API Blueprint
Domain Blueprint
System Blueprint
Microservices SDLC
Scaffold a new microservice
Deploy (canary or blue-green)
Feature flagging
Revert
Lock deployments
Add Secret
Force merge pull request (skip tests on crises)
Add environment variable to service
Add IaC to the service
Upgrade package version
Development environments
Spin up a developer environment for 5 days
ETL mock data to environment
Invite developer to the environment
Extend TTL by 3 days
Cloud resources
Provision a cloud resource
Modify a cloud resource
Get permissions to access cloud resource
SRE actions
Update pod count
Update auto-scaling group
Execute incident response runbook automation
Data Engineering
Add / Remove / Update Column to table
Run Airflow DAG
Duplicate table
Backoffice
Change customer configuration
Update customer software version
Upgrade - Downgrade plan tier
Create - Delete customer
Machine learning actions
Train model
Pre-process dataset
Deploy
A/B testing traffic route
Revert
Spin up remote Jupyter notebook
Engineering tools
Observability
Tasks management
CI/CD
On-Call management
Troubleshooting tools
DevSecOps
Runbooks
Infrastructure
Cloud Resources
K8S
Containers & Serverless
IaC
Databases
Environments
Regions
Software and more
Microservices
Docker Images
Docs
APIs
3rd parties
Runbooks
Cron jobs