2023: Top SRE Tools

Introduction

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When choosing new tools for your Site Reliability Engineering needs, there are several factors you will need to consider, which will define your IT operations. In this article, I tell you about the most popular and sought-out tools that Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) need to have in their toolkits to keep up to date with SRE best practices.

What Are SRE Tools?

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SRE tools help to ensure there is a much-needed bridge between the existing gaps in system design, development, and operational execution by providing IT teams with the ability to assess and comprehend new insights on platform reliability.

Why You Need To Choose The Right SRE Tools

Choosing the right SRE tools is as important as anything when planning out system and infrastructure design. The tools you choose and use at any given time essentially depend on where your team is at in its SRE journey.

When selecting SRE tools for your team, there are a couple of factors to consider. If your team is at the initial phases of its SRE journey, you will tend to use more specialized operations tools, as opposed to the set of SRE tools more mature organizations will use. There is a need for your team to experiment and adapt the right tools as it continues on its journey to seek new, efficient ways to bring more reliability to actions carried out by the team.

Factors To Consider When Choosing SRE Tools

Every team and organization has its own outlined ways of defining infrastructures and platforms. Depending on the SRE practices your organization implements, and how your organization builds its architectures, there is always the need for the SRE tools you will be working with to be standardized. Below are some important factors to consider when standardizing SRE tools.

Cost

SRE is expensive, no doubt. This brings forth the need to adopt only SRE practices that will benefit your business. The structure of many formal frameworks, including SRE, is staggering in its demands for costs as well as human resources.

Increasing demand leads many organizations to implement newly-defined structures and fit them into IT operations when it makes business sense and has a considerable amount of impact. This sort of case results in a large cost disadvantage for SRE teams.

Additionally, since SRE only works for certain software applications, noting that teams aren't running commits daily - teams in organizations like healthcare or finance verticals. Paying for SRE tools and not making use of the tools is one thing, and paying for tools and under-utilizing them is another. All of these need to be put into perspective.

Good Integration With Existing Tools

Aside from the cost, the level of potential integration the tool you are considering has about another tool you are considering is also important. All systems used in an organization are never going to be the same. There is an increasing number of integrations between tools, but there is also a large variety of languages, platforms, encryption types, and more that are being utilized by systems, and communication between these entities is important. The communication your intended tool has with another intended tool will allow these various tools to share data seamlessly.

Consider a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) architecture that is focused on delivering high-level support facilities with easily scalable infrastructure. This kind of architecture will always rely on tools that are primarily designated for cloud-native applications. Examples of tools used by this architecture would be Docker and Kubernetes. Docker uses operating-system-level virtualizations to deliver softwares in containers, while Kubernetes is a container orchestrator that automates the process around scaling, managing, updating, and removing containers. Kubernetes integrates well with Docker because it relies on a container runtime to orchestrate.

Community or 1st Party Support?

Another factor to consider is the level of support being garnered by the tool. Any tool being considered for your SRE practice needs to have a high level of support. If the tool is open source, then there has to be a great community of maintainers around the tool, and in the case of a non-Free and Open Source Software, the 1st party support of the SRE tool needs to be 1st class. This factor is beyond cost limitations as many free SRE tools can provide an equal level of functionality compared to some paid tools. Though some others offer less functionality compared to their paid competitors.

Outputs - visualizations and reporting?

Clear and great visibility of your system reporting is a great first step to the improved stability of your infrastructure. Having an eagle’s eye view of your system makes preemptive solving of problems possible. Getting the right data at the right time with associated context will always make troubleshooting stuff easier, which is a game-changer for those who want better system stability. Apart from offering the needed insight into your team's SRE data, dashboarding tools have great and appealing visual representations of data, and it is always great to work with dashboarding tools that provide great visual representations.

Dashboarding tools like Grafana help SREs in figuring out issues much more effectively by visualizing all the necessary data points on a single screen. These tools offer precise information about the system's health by providing adequate graphical representations of system data.

“Grafana provides an integrated solution to metrics and logs for composing observability characteristics in the form of graphical representation.”

Reliability/Stability - especially important for monitoring and alerting

As long as your organization is following SRE practices, you must ensure that your SRE tools are reliable and stable at all times. SRE tools that are not stable might damage the health condition of your systems or break the systems. Monitoring is a good case to evaluate reliability and stability, which is required to ascertain that a system is behaving as expected. So also is alerting, which is required to get real-time updates on systems at specific times. Monitoring and alerting tools that are being evaluated the need to identify performance errors and help maintain service availability with the utmost efficiency, as SRE teams will always need to see what’s going on in their systems. Teams need to ensure that their systems are meeting specific goals, and understanding what happens when a change is made to the system before a customer/user does is key. The more reason SRE tools need to be reliable and stable, monitoring and alerting tools most importantly.

How Automated Is The Tool? - the more work the tool handles, the less cognitive load on SREs

Before settling down on a tool for use, it is important to understand the amount of work the tool can handle in your workload. You’ll need to evaluate the API offerings of the tool for extensibility if the tool seems limited. APIs are a set of functions and procedures in software development that allows for adequate communication between various components. Without APIs, additional complex steps will always be required to use an SRE tool across large corporates or startups, which can make the tool very difficult to use. Aside from the amount of work the SRE tool can carry out, it is also important to know how well the tool is automated, as this will allow you and the team to do more with less at all times.

Potential For Customization To Suit Organizational Needs

A number of the SRE tools you will be making use of will be limited. So it makes sense to want to make customizations to the tools to suit your needs. An SRE tool that doesn't allow for customizations will not be extensible, thereby limiting your usage of the tool.

Customizable tools should also have proper documentation and tutorials that will help make sure your team understands the basic functionalities of the tool. To extend the capabilities of some tools, you might need access to public or private API offerings for such tools, but also ensure you can get the necessary access whenever you need it.

What A Model SRE Tool Stack Might Look Like; For Large Corporate Enterprises & High Growth Startups

Service delivery and data management processes differ according to company size, but due to SRE practices being followed by companies, large corporates, and high-growth startups now use mostly the same SRE tool stack. The following is a typical tool stack for companies;

Source Code Control

Software source code control is an essential part of SRE. Without proper code management and integration, building efficient systems will not be possible, as the transport of code has to be tracked end to end, this will ensure code defects are detected early. Source code control tools make this possible.

The notable source code control tool for large corporates and high-growth startups is Git, which is an open-source version control system.

Configuration Management

Configuration management is the process of maintaining and establishing the consistency of a software product by tracking and controlling all changes made to the product. Configuration management tools ensure software products are in a desired and consistent state.

The notable configuration management tools for use are Chef (used by Meta) and Ansible. Chef helps in streamlining configuration management tasks across cloud platforms to automatically provision new machines, while Ansible also helps in enabling an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) architecture, aside from its configuration management offering.

Data Storage

Data is a key factor in every business operation. And real-time data processing and management help in quality decision-making. There is also the need to have data stored with a tool that can ensure easy access to the data and the correct integrity of the data being stored.

The notable data storage tools for use are NoSQL databases that store data in raw key/value pairs but not tabular relations used by SQL databases, this is because of the need to process data in instantaneous time and provide room for horizontal scaling when needed. Examples of these NoSQL databases are; RocksDB, DynamoDB, CosmosDB, MongoDB.

Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Continuous integration is a process whereby code for specific software functionalities is integrated via the automated testing of every change affected on the source code. Continuous delivery follows continuous integration by delivering the tested codebase through automated deployments to a production environment.

The notable CI/CD tools for use are Jenkins and CircleCI.

Jenkins is an open-source automation server that enables teams to reliably build, test, and deploy their software. CircleCI also automates the software development and delivery process across an organization's cloud and infrastructures.

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Observability

Observability is a major factor in maintaining system health. SREs are embedded with the task to build queries across alert systems to check whether all functionalities are running as expected. This also helps when there's the need to generate alerts in case of a defect in system behavior. Tools for observability vary, this includes tools for Log Aggregation, Application Performance Monitoring, Metrics Collection, Distributed Tracing.

The notable observability tools for use, across observability areas, include the following;

Log Aggregation

Sentry is a log aggregation tool that collects system data from various endpoints and directly enhances the performances of the source code.

Fluentd is a data collector built for a unified logging layer across architectures.

Application Performance Monitoring Tools

DynaTrace has observability, security features, intelligent solutions, and automation features built-in in a single platform that helps developers monitor the performance of the system effectively

AppDynamics is an observability platform that provides real-time data insights for system performance and helps in driving business growth and productivity

Metrics Collection

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring tool that provides a dimensional (time-series) data model of all system performance characteristics

InfluxDB helps the development team in building and monitoring time-stamped data series across the infrastructure.

Distributed Tracing

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework for monitoring cloud-native software applications with telemetry data.

Dashboarding

Dashboarding helps in figuring out issues much more effectively by visualizing all the necessary data points on a single screen. These tools offer precise information about the system's health by providing adequate graphical representations of system data.

Grafana provides an integrated solution to metrics and logs for composing observability characteristics in the form of graphical representations.

Containers and Orchestrators

Containers are portable operating-system-level virtualizations. They execute their capabilities by gathering all the necessary configuration files and executables needed by microservices and orchestration tools.

The notable tools around Containers and Orchestrators for use are Docker which is used for operating system-level virtualizations to deliver softwares in containers, and Kubernetes which is a container orchestrator that automates the process around scaling, managing, updating, and removing containers. Kubernetes integrates well with Docker because it relies on a container runtime to orchestrate. ‍

Alerting System

Alert systems rank highest amongst all the observability tools because they direct all incoming system alerts to the requisite internal services.

Conclusion

This blog post was compiled to cover the factors to put into consideration when mapping out SRE tools for use. If you’re just planning to adopt SRE practices in your organization, train your team on SRE tools, or just follow SRE best practices, this guide showed you the top tools to consider for the job, and how each of the factors outlined above is an important step to take when planning to work with SRE tools.