Question

Your SRE team supports 12 services and is consistently overwhelmed by operational work, leaving no time for project engineering. Leadership asks how to decide which operational activities to automate first. You want to apply Google SRE principles to justify the prioritization objectively. What is the BEST first step before deciding what to automate?

Accepted Answer

Measure and categorize the team's toil to identify which repetitive, manual, automatable tasks consume the most engineering time

Answer

Immediately hire additional operations staff so the current team can focus exclusively on new feature development

Answer

Automate the most technically interesting tasks first, since engineers will be more motivated to complete that work

Answer

Set a policy capping all operational work at zero hours per week and reassign all tickets to the development teams