SRE Activities Checklist: Monitoring, Automation, and More [2025 Guide]

• SREs focus on much more than just monitoring; they are reliability engineers optimizing automation, capacity planning, and incident response.
   
• This checklist includes 10+ activity categories, from alert tuning to chaos testing.
   
• Real-world tools you’ll need: Grafana, Terraform, PagerDuty, and more.
   
• Learn how NovelVista’s SRE Training equips you to implement this checklist in your organization.
   
• Download your free SRE Activities Checklist PDF to get started today!

To ensure your systems are reliable and scalable, it’s crucial to focus on the right tasks at the right time. Below is a core activities of SRE checklist that will guide your daily, weekly, and long-term activities.

Daily/Weekly Core Tasks

1. Monitoring & Observability

Monitoring is the foundation of SRE. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and in the world of SRE, observability is the key to understanding your system’s health and performance.

• Set up dashboards using tools like Grafana and Prometheus to visualize system metrics.
   
• Ensure you’re tracking the four golden signals: latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. These signals provide a comprehensive view of your system’s performance.
   
• Monitor SLIs (Service Level Indicators) and SLOs (Service Level Objectives) to measure how well your services meet reliability standards.

2. Incident Management

Incident management is at the heart of SRE practices. The faster your team can respond to incidents, the less impact they will have on your systems.

• Maintain on-call readiness: Ensure your team is prepared and equipped to handle incidents efficiently.
   
• Review alerts to identify noise and improve accuracy. Tuning alerts ensures your team isn’t overwhelmed by false alarms.
   
• Conduct Post-Incident Reviews (PIRs) to analyze root causes, identify weaknesses, and improve your incident response protocols for next time.

3. Automation Hygiene

Automation is the backbone of modern SRE practices. Replacing manual runbooks with automated processes ensures that your team can focus on higher-value tasks, reducing errors and speeding up incident resolution.

• Update alerting thresholds with auto-tuning to automatically adjust based on evolving system conditions.
   
• Replace runbooks with scripts (e.g., Bash, Python, Go) to automate common tasks that were previously handled manually.

Monthly/Quarterly Strategic Initiatives

1. SLOs/SLIs Management

• Review SLO breaches regularly. Make adjustments to your SLOs based on user impact and evolving business priorities.
   
• Adjust error budgets to balance reliability with innovation, and use this data to manage stakeholder expectations effectively.

2. Capacity & Scalability Planning

• Forecast infrastructure needs based on usage trends and anticipated growth. Proactively plan to meet demand spikes and avoid capacity bottlenecks.
   
• Right-size services using cost-aware autoscaling to optimize performance without overspending on infrastructure.

3. Release Engineering

• Support zero-downtime deployments by validating your rollback automation processes. Ensure that any release issues can be addressed without downtime.
   
• Automate rollbacks based on SLO violations to prevent any lasting impact on end users.

Long-Term Reliability Engineering Tasks

1. Chaos Engineering

• Schedule controlled failures using tools like Gremlin or LitmusChaos to test how your system behaves under stress.
   
• Evaluate system resilience by subjecting it to various failure scenarios. This helps identify weaknesses that need to be addressed.

2. Security & Compliance Collaboration

• Automate compliance reporting to meet industry standards and regulatory requirements.
   
• Work closely with your infosec team to integrate anomaly detection tools into your SRE workflows. This helps detect and mitigate threats quickly.

Tools Mapped to SRE Activities

Here’s a handy reference table that matches tools with the key SRE activities:

Becoming a reliable SRE isn’t just about having the right tools; it’s about mastering systems thinking, cultivating an automation culture, and applying real-world best practices. Here’s how NovelVista’s SRE Foundation Course can help professionals gain the skills they need to succeed:

Live, Instructor-Led Sessions

Learn in real-time with live sessions that include hands-on labs and exposure to industry-standard tools like Prometheus, Terraform, and PagerDuty. These sessions provide practical experience, ensuring that you not only learn theory but also apply your knowledge effectively.

Accredited, Up-to-Date Courseware

Our courseware is aligned with SRE best practices and industry frameworks, ensuring that you’re learning the latest and most relevant content to excel in your role.

Experienced Instructors

Our instructors are certified SRE professionals with years of experience in cloud-native environments, offering practical insights into the challenges you’ll face on the job.

98.3% Pass Rate

With a 98.3% first-attempt pass rate, NovelVista’s SRE training prepares you for success by simulating real-world scenarios and preparing you for your next big challenge.

Post-Course Support

After training, you’ll have access to mentorship, tool templates, and community groups to ensure continuous learning and practical application.

Now that you have the SRE activities checklist, it’s time to put it into action. Here’s a structured 90-day roadmap to help you implement SRE automation and improve system reliability across your team.

Step-by-Step Rollout:

1. Week 1–2: Audit Your Current SRE Practices and Monitoring Stack

Before diving into automation, you need to audit your current setup. This means assessing your existing monitoring, alerting, and incident management tools, as well as identifying manual processes that can be automated.

Tasks:

• Conduct an SRE maturity assessment to see where you stand.
   
• Review your current monitoring stack and ensure you’re tracking the golden signals.
   
• Identify high-toil tasks that steal your team's time.
   

2. Week 3–4: Implement Daily/Weekly Activities and Basic Alerting

Once you have a baseline, you can start integrating observability and alerting automation into your workflow. The goal here is to set up tools like Grafana and Prometheus to enable real-time monitoring and intelligent alerting.

Tasks:

• Set up dashboards using Grafana or Prometheus to visualize metrics.
   
• Start automating basic alerting workflows to reduce false positives.
   
• Review and refine alerting thresholds to minimize noise and ensure only critical incidents are escalated.

3. Month 2: Define SLOs/SLIs and Incident Management Flow

With basic automation in place, it’s time to focus on defining your SLOs (Service Level Objectives) and SLIs (Service Level Indicators). These metrics will help you track the reliability of your services. In parallel, fine-tune your incident management flow to ensure incidents are resolved quickly.

Tasks:

• Set up SLOs and SLIs to measure the performance and reliability of your services.
   
• Create an incident management flow and automate common responses.
   
• Fine-tune your on-call rotation process and ensure readiness.
   

4. Month 3: Introduce Chaos Testing and Auto-Remediation Tools

In the final stretch of your SRE automation journey, focus on chaos engineering to evaluate system resilience under failure conditions. This will help identify potential weak points in your systems. Also, introduce auto-remediation tools that can take corrective actions automatically when issues arise.

Tasks:

• Set up chaos engineering experiments using tools like Gremlin or LitmusChaos.
   
• Implement self-healing automation such as auto-scaling or service restarts based on predefined conditions.
   
• Test auto-remediation flows to reduce manual intervention.

SRE automation is not just a set of tools; it’s a mindset shift. By automating critical reliability tasks such as monitoring, incident response, and deployment, you can focus on scaling and innovating rather than just putting out fires. The tools like Grafana, PagerDuty, Terraform, and Prometheus are powerful when combined with structured guidance and hands-on learning.

SRE isn’t just about monitoring and firefighting; it’s about building resilient, self-healing systems that can handle incidents with minimal human intervention. Start small, implement automation gradually, and watch your systems become more reliable and your team more productive.

With NovelVista’s SRE Training, you’ll get the tools, techniques, and mentorship needed to transform your workflows and implement this checklist with confidence.

Next Steps:

• Download the FREE core activities of SRE Checklist to guide your journey toward full automation.
   
• Join NovelVista’s SRE Foundation Training to dive deeper into hands-on training with expert guidance, industry-standard tools, and real-world scenarios.