Site Reliability Engineer Tools - Top 15
Over the last few years, we’ve seen an increase in Site Reliability Engineering roles in various software companies. Combined with the increased complexity of software technologies and a growing demand for faster deployment, tools used by engineers in these positions are quickly becoming critical to the success of companies of all sizes. With the rapid change in the industry, tools that accomplish more are emerging, while those that have been favorites are rolling out new features to remain competitive. Our goal is to cover the current most utilized site reliability engineer tools in the industry.
Programming Languages for SREs
Although Site Reliability Engineering doesn’t directly involve software development, engineers in these roles typically need to understand, review, and troubleshoot code. Their job also requires scripting - a software-based way to implement, modify, and query infrastructure.
Python
Python is a language that was released several decades ago. However, it has risen due to the libraries popularized in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning verticals. However, Python is a highly versatile language due to its adoption in many verticals, including the software infrastructure space, which Site Reliability Engineers often use. As a result, Python is the most widely used language in SRE roles.
It’s important to note that Python is an excellent stepping stone into many other modern languages. As a result, many programmers recommend learning Python before diving into C/C++, Java, Go, etc. Several reasons drive this advice:
- Python is widely documented, and you can easily find references for any tasks.
- Python was created as a scripting language and is thus lightweight with a simpler syntax than most other languages.
- Python requires little tooling and can be deployed on various platforms - From Raspberry Pi to cloud servers.
- Python simplifies several concepts that aren’t automated in other programming languages. For example, it provides automated garbage collection that isn’t available in C/C++ which may lead to memory leaks.
Books on Python we Recommend for SREs
- Python for DevOps: Learn Ruthlessly Effective Automation
- Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale
Interesting Resources on Python we Recommend for SREs
Go
Go is an open-source programming language developed and released by Google not long ago. Although the language isn’t as mature as some of the others, it has quickly risen in popularity among developers, especially the SRE community. Go is light and compiles incredibly fast. It has been developed with scripting in mind, provides garbage collection, and RE2 regular expressions, and has built-in testing, benchmarking, and profiling.
Books on Go we Recommend for SREs
Interesting Resources on Go we Recommend for SREs
Ruby
The most commonly conversationally known version of Ruby is “Ruby on Rails”. Although this Ruby framework is often used in web development, Ruby is a powerful server-side programming language that rivals Python. Most companies that utilize the Ruby on Rails framework for their web applications will also use many of the Ruby features in their infrastructure and server software. Therefore, Ruby has become quite popular among engineers who support standardized organizations on this platform. It’s important to note that Ruby is one of the only languages created with front-end integration in mind. In other words, it better manages the interaction between HTML, CSS, Javascript, and the backend than most other languages.
Interesting Resources on Ruby we Recommend for SREs
Observability and Monitoring Tools for SREs
Observability and monitoring are essential tasks of site reliability engineers. By collecting, analyzing, and making decisions on critical data coming from software systems and infrastructure, SREs drive business value for their company. The tools listed below are key in accomplishing these tasks promptly and reliably.
Datadog
Datadog is one of the leading monitoring tools for IT and DevOps teams. It provides numerous services integrated into software, microservices, applications, and infrastructure. These integrations aim to give SREs metrics they can use to optimize the systems they support.
Datadog installs an agent on the hosts. The agent is a piece of code that can be instructed to collect and forward data into a database from which it can be viewed on dashboards provided by Datadog.
Splunk
Splunk is a direct competitor to Datadog. However, it’s more commonly used in big data applications that leverage cloud services. Splunk is a service capable of processing large amounts of machine data and presenting meaningful decisions to the end user. Real-time data acquisition and processing is one of the platform's most significant selling points. Rightfully so, as the amount of data software-based applications is generating is growing exponentially. Being able to collect and process information is critical for many companies.
New Relic
New Relic is another alternative to observability and monitoring SREs have to Datadog and Splunk. Based on our industry conversations, New Relic is a tool with the added flexibility that puts the SRE in the driver's seat. Like the other two, an agent is required to collect the data necessary, store it in a database, and present it in a dashboard for the end-user. However, the first advantage of New Relic is giving the user flexibility around the dashboards they create. In short, once the data flow is established, the user can arrange and create the dashboard they desire. In addition, new Relic incorporates other features that SREs admire:
- Browser monitoring allows them to segment users based on their browser and capabilities and account for variations in different software configurations.
- New Relic incorporates AI capabilities that automatically analyze the data flowing into the database at no extra cost.
- After acquiring CodeStream in October 2021, New Relic now manages to provide workflows directly in the IDE.
Incident Response Tools for SREs
Upon system malfunction, it becomes critical to notify the right stakeholders and provide them with the information they need to troubleshoot the failure. Incident response tools are used by a site reliability engineer to instrument infrastructure through the observability and monitoring stack and to notify them of critical system metrics. Although incident response tools rarely gather the data, they’re excellent at integrating into other tools and setting limits upon which a flag must be raised. Once raised, the tool issues a notification in the form of email, slack message, or call depending on the severity of the problem.
PagerDuty
PagerDuty is an incident management tool designed to help software engineers and DevOps teams respond to incidents quickly and efficiently. The tool integrates with various monitoring and alerting tools to automatically notify the right people at the right time when incidents occur. It also provides on-call scheduling, escalation policies, and collaboration features to ensure that incidents are resolved promptly and effectively. With PagerDuty, software engineers can easily track incidents, communicate with team members, and analyze incident data to improve their incident response processes.
Dynatrace
Opsgenie offers rich reporting and analytics capabilities, giving engineers valuable insights into their incident response processes. With its robust integrations and APIs, Opsgenie easily fits into any DevOps toolchain and helps engineers streamline incident management workflows.
Configuration, Virtualization, and Code Deployment Tools for SREs
In the last decade, we’ve seen a massive uptick in CI / CD deployment tools and several services that facilitate virtualization.
Docker
Docker is a tool known by most software engineers by now. It is a service that wraps any software/code into a container that can be deployed and used in various systems. Docker is a powerful tool that runs the current microservices infrastructure. It’s easy to set up, it’s easy to deploy, and it provides a modular/scalable way to create applications.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that simplifies containerized applications' deployment, scaling, and management. It automates many tasks in managing containers, such as load balancing, scaling, and self-healing, allowing software engineers to focus on developing their applications. In production, Kubernetes runs and manages containerized applications at scale. It can deploy microservices-based applications, create complex topologies, and manage containerized workloads across multiple clusters and cloud providers. For example, it can deploy and manage a web application with numerous microservices, each running in its own container. In addition, Kubernetes can automatically scale the containers based on demand, handle rolling updates, and ensure high availability by distributing the containers across multiple nodes.
Terraform
Terraform is an open-source infrastructure-as-code tool that allows software engineers to declaratively define and manage infrastructure resources across various cloud providers and on-premises data centers. With Terraform, engineers can specify the desired state of their infrastructure as code and apply it to their environments in a repeatable and consistent manner. This allows for more efficient and reliable infrastructure management and reduces the risk of human error. In production, Terraform can be used to provision, update, and destroy infrastructure resources such as virtual machines, containers, load balancers, databases, and network configurations. For example, it can be used to provision a new production environment in the cloud with a few lines of code or to automate the deployment of infrastructure changes across multiple environments with a single command. Terraform also allows for creating reusable modules, which can be shared and reused across different projects and teams, further increasing efficiency and standardization.
Communication & Team Management Tools for SREs
SREs communicate with engineers on other teams regularly. They must have a streamlined approach to getting in touch with the parties that need to deploy or have issues with the code they’ve deployed. Several tools have been developed to help them not only communicate 1 on 1, and with entire teams, functions, to create tickets, send appropriate metrics, etc.
Slack
Slack is still the most utilized tool for software engineering teams. It provides a clean interface with multiple features, making it easy for SREs and developers to get in touch. In addition, Slack has released numerous ways to integrate with other SRE-based applications, to get into meetings, and align priorities.
Microsoft Suite & Teams
Microsoft has heavily invested in developing Teams as a response to Slack. Since the company has extensive adoption by many software organizations, it can easily deploy and incentivize its tools, including Microsoft Teams. In addition to a means of communication, Microsoft provides known business tools - Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook. Since they seamlessly integrate with Teams and are bundled under a single pricing structure, they are an easy choice for many companies.
Telegram
Telegram offers a free and reliable messaging service suitable for smaller businesses. In addition, SREs can easily communicate with key contacts and integrate the process into Slack if necessary.
What is SRE tooling?
Site Reliability Engineers use tools that aid them in deploying code, provisioning infrastructure systems, gathering data, understanding metrics, and communicating with the right teams. SRE tooling is a set of tools that aim to make all those functions easier. Although no single tool can accomplish all of those tasks, we’ve outlined a number of highly capable tools that will aid you in becoming a better SRE. Every software organization is different and we thus recommend evaluating the needs before deciding on one stack or another. Remember that the tooling will depend on the size, the industry, and the nature of the application the company has developed. For example, the SRE tooling between a microservice-based e-commerce platform will be vastly different from that of a monolithic banking organization.
What are the technologies in SRE?
We recommend that every SRE becomes familiar with the tools we outlined above. However, it may be overwhelming at first. Here’s the approach we believe to be optimal for learning the stack if you’re starting with no experience:
- Choose a programming language to become familiar with - we recommend Python. As an SRE, you don’t need to be an expert programmer. Your goal is to learn the libraries that allow you to work in the DevOps space. Understand how to write scripts that deploy cloud elements and retrieve their status.
- Choose a cloud computing service - we recommend AWS. At the free tier, you should be able to learn and deploy some of the services. By doing so, learn how cloud infrastructure functions, is deployed, and what it provides for developers. Once again, you don’t need to get into all the technical details of every cloud service. However, you should have an understanding of most commonly used services.
- Learn which data is important for software monitoring. Read what developers are saying about benchmarking software and infrastructure.
Conclusion on Site Reliability Engineer Tools
We’ve covered multiple tools that SREs use regularly. These tools allow engineers in these roles to monitor applications, respond to issues, and to communicate with their team. They facilitate the deployment of new code and shorten the incident response time.
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