Toil Reduction & Automation

SREs are engineers. Their time is best spent on engineering, not manual, repetitive tasks.

What is Toil?

Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and scales linearly as a service grows.

Measuring Toil

SRE teams should aim to cap operational work (toil) at 50% of their time.

Automation Strategies

Identify the most frequent manual tasks (e.g., user provisioning, database backups, simple restarts) and write self-healing scripts or self-service tools to eliminate them.