Report: 62% of SREs and devops specialists say their biggest challenge is unclear ownership boundaries

When an application crashes or a page doesn’t load, who is on the hook for fixes? In many organizations, the responsibility is often put on operations or reliability teams — but is that how it should be? 

Increasingly, modern organizations are moving towards a decentralized culture in their engineering teams, a “you build it, you own it” mentality. Newly released data from Sentry and SlashData reveals this is the preferred path forward from site reliability engineers (SREs) and ops professionals. Of the 140 SREs and devops practitioners surveyed, 62% say they want clearer delineation of application and infrastructure ownership following code deployment.

And why is that? A whopping 74% said the one activity they spend too much time on is chasing down others to resolve application issues. Conversely, 64% said their organization should spend more time analyzing and fixing infrastructure vulnerabilities.

The stakes are high: Loss of customers, reduced productivity

It’s vital that organizations get this right, as taking reactive measures to address application errors can become wildly costly to the bottom line. Customers are also quick to leave for competing companies when they are inconvenienced by recurring issues.

Almost half of the SRE/devops practitioners surveyed in Sentry’s Infrastructure vs. Applications Report indicated that application issues result in more time spent on customer service, which significantly impacts SRE/devops teams’ productivity. From a resourcing perspective, 30% of SRE/devops practitioners estimate that their teams lose more than one person-month in productivity per year fixing application issues. 

For modern organizations to operate even more efficiently, decentralization is the way to go. While 52% of respondents are currently working in a decentralized environment, Sentry discovered that more than half of those surveyed prefer each department to have more autonomy and control over their environments, and the tooling that’s right for their team.

Methodology

Sentry and SlashData, surveyed 140 site reliability engineers (SREs) and devops practitioners with responsibilities within organizations that contain more than 50 employees and live software applications in production.

Read the full report from Sentry.