SRE Report 2025 - Key Takeaways

Now in its seventh year, the SRE Report 2025 by Catchpoint is here. At 58 pages, it’s comprehensive—but not everyone has time to sift through all that content. Here, I’ve distilled the report’s most valuable insights for you, cutting out the marketing fluff.

Growing Demand for SLOs

The 2025 report confirms that the industry has experienced over the recent years: a degraded or slow experience is as much of an incident as a full outage. There is a larger demand to measure an organzation’s demand based on SLOs instead.

Toil Levels Increased in 2024

After steady reductions in toil since 2020, toil levels rose by about 6% in 2024, according to surveyed SREs. Perhaps this increase is connected to some key findings of the 2024 DORA report: AI doesn’t reduce toil, and Platform Engineering introduces more failures.

Observability Gaps Persist

A striking 51% of the responders expressed not having enough observability within their organization. Interestingly, teams using 6–10 observability tools were the most happy about having the right amount of instrumentation.

No Time for Training

An overwhelming 67% of the SREs who responded the survey expressed to not have enough time to spend on technical training.

AI and SREs

When it comes to AI, 37% of respondents approach it cautiously, while 30% expressed interest in training to use AI more effectively. The most common AI use case? Writing code—a trend consistent with insights from the DORA report.

Incident response trends

The report shed light on several incident response trends:

• 40% reported to have responded to 1–5 incidents in the past 30 days.
• 55% of responders participate in on-call rotations, while 20% are only present in escalations.
• Seniority impacts incident involvement: individual contributors typically handle 1–5 incidents per month, while management often deals with 6–10 or even 11–20 incidents monthly.

Post-incident stress

Stress during incidents is common, but the report uncovered something surprising: 28% of respondents feel more stressed after incidents are resolved. Factors like post-incident remediation tasks or a lack of a blameless culture may contribute to this lingering stress.

The Full Report

For those who want to dive deeper, the full report is available here (no signup required). While it offers more detail on certain topics, the report is based on a survey of 301 participants and doesn’t provide a full ecosystem deep dive.