Blog post
You shouldn’t have to understand the care behind this report, unless it’s missing.
For the past eight years, this research has focused on all things related to reliability and resilience. How systems behave under stress. How teams respond when things break. And how the practices continue to evolve.
Reaching the eighth edition of The SRE Report attests to that and gives me pause. You can read the full report here and you can find a summary of the key findings here.
When we first started this work, I do not think any of us imagined what it would become. At the time, it was simply an attempt to listen carefully to a field that was still defining itself. Over the years, it has grown into something far more meaningful. It has become a shared record of how reliability work is actually practiced, debated, and lived.
I feel deeply appreciative of what this report has become. It would not exist in its current form without a small group of people who made it better, truer, and more human. Their contributions come first, before anything else that happened along the way. This post is for them.
Thank you
Kurt Andersen: I hung up my full-time practitioner hat some years ago. Kurt never let me forget what that hat represented. He kept me honest when ideas drifted too far from reality, challenged assumptions that felt convenient but were not true to the field, and consistently grounded the work in lived experience. This report is stronger because of that discipline.
Beril Unal: If you have never had the chance to work on a project like this, the early stages are not glamorous. They begin with doodles in a notebook, half-formed sentences, arrows pointing nowhere, and documents that look more like sketches than plans. Then there is a moment, rare and a little magical, when someone with true artistic vision steps in. Beril took those rough ideas and transformed them into something cohesive, expressive, and emotionally resonant. Calling Beril a designer never felt quite right. Artist fits better.
Denton Chikura: Denton has been more than a colleague. He has been a constant. A steady presence. A positive force when momentum mattered most. He is also a brilliant writer with a rare ability to clarify ideas without flattening them. When this report reads cleanly and confidently, it is often because Denton helped it get there.
Our executive sponsors: This report requires time. Real time. Time that could easily be redirected toward work more directly tied to revenue. When that time is protected anyway, it signals something important. It says the effort is sincere. That learning matters. That contributing back to the community is part of the job, not a side project. I am grateful for the trust and support given by Mehdi Daoudi, Drit Suljioti, Gerardo Dada, and Howard Beader.
Marc Brooker: I also want to acknowledge Marc, who wrote the foreword for this year’s report. He paid it forward, offering perspective and clarity that helped set the tone for what follows. I’m grateful for his willingness to lend his voice and context to this work.
A few things that did not go as planned
The SRE Report is one of the ways I try to contribute to something larger than myself. That is why, when the initial survey was hijacked by spammers and bots, we took it personally.
The right decision was not the easiest one. We took the survey down and threw out a portion of the responses. Then we relaunched it. We scrubbed the original dataset. We compared it carefully against the new one. When we looked at the results side by side, the percentages were remarkably close, often within three to four percent of each other. That gave us confidence that the integrity of the data was preserved.
In other words, we had defensible Ns.
About a month before the planned launch, another unexpected moment arrived. At an all-hands meeting, we learned that Catchpoint was being acquired by LogicMonitor.
That brings me to one final thank you.
The LogicMonitor team stepped in quickly and helped us navigate, in short order, all the new people and processes that suddenly needed to be involved. Despite the timing and the change, the commitment to publishing the report never wavered. That continuity mattered, and it deserves to be acknowledged.
This report exists because people care. They care about the field, about accuracy, about learning, and about each other. I have deep respect for everyone who contributed their time, energy, and trust to it.
As the SRE Report 2026 launches, I hope it invites conversation, reflection, and maybe a little disagreement. That has always been the point.
If you’d like to go deeper into this years work:
- Read the full SRE Report 2026 here.
- Get the key takeaways in our highlights blog
- Look back at how the research has evolved
Thank you for reading. Thank you for contributing. And thank you for helping make this work what it is.
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