The SRE Report 2026: Reliability Is Being Redefined

Catchpoint’s annual report shows why speed, user experience, and business impact now define reliability in the AI era

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – Jan. 22, 2026 – LogicMonitor, the AI-first hybrid observability platform redefining how enterprises see and run their digital operations, today released The SRE Report 2026 through Catchpoint, its Internet Performance and Digital Experience Monitoring business. Now in its eighth year, the report draws on insights from over 400 site reliability, DevOps, and IT professionals worldwide and reveals a clear shift in how reliability is defined, measured, and valued in the AI era.

“This year’s SRE Report makes one thing unmistakably clear: reliability has crossed a point of no return,” said Mehdi Daoudi, GM of Catchpoint at LogicMonitor. “It’s no longer something you prove with uptime charts after the fact. Reliability today is defined by speed, by experience, and by whether the business can trust its digital systems to perform in moments that matter.”

The findings point to a clear inflection point. Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet.

Now in its eighth year, The SRE Report is widely regarded as an authentic voice of the reliability community, highlighting the trends and tensions shaping how digital services are built, measured, and trusted. The 2026 edition highlights growing alignment between engineers and leadership that performance degradations are as damaging as outages, while also exposing persistent gaps in how organizations connect reliability to business outcomes, AI confidence, and long-term resilience.

“As AI and distributed architectures become foundational, reliability can’t stop at the application layer,” said Dritan Suljoti, Catchpoint CTO at LogicMonitor. “The data shows teams are grappling with complexity across the Internet stack, and that’s exactly where modern observability and Internet Performance Monitoring must evolve to keep pace.”

Key findings from the report include:

• Slow is the new down, and now the default expectation: Nearly two-thirds of respondents say performance degradations are as serious as outages, reinforcing speed and experience as core reliability outcomes.
• Reliability is felt by users, but rarely measured by the business: Only 26% consistently measure whether performance improvements affect business metrics such as revenue or NPS, revealing a persistent gap between what users feel and what organizations track.
• AI optimism is surging, while confidence in observing AI lags: 60% of respondents express optimism about AI in SRE, and more than half plan to deploy agentic AI systems in production within the next 12 months. While this represents more than double the confidence reported last year, teams report low confidence in monitoring AI reliability, underscoring the need for observability across internal systems and external dependencies.
• Toil remains high, even as AI adoption grows: Median toil is 34% of engineers’ time. While 49% report AI has reduced toil, others report no change or increased burden, showing uneven outcomes between leadership expectations and frontline realities.
• Resilience maturity remains uneven: Only 17% run chaos or resilience experiments regularly in production, and nearly half report low tolerance for planned failure, pointing to a widening divide between proactive resilience teams and reactive teams.
• Learning has become a reliability risk factor: Despite broad agreement that learning matters, just 6% report protected learning time, and most spend only 3–4 hours per month on upskilling, raising concerns about knowledge decay as systems become more AI-driven and Internet-dependent.

As organizations accelerate cloud adoption, distribute architectures across regions and providers, and introduce AI systems into production, the report underscores a pivotal reality: reliability is increasingly a trust and reputation metric, not just an engineering scorecard. The organizations that treat reliability as a shared business language, and instrument it accordingly, will be better positioned to scale AI, protect digital experiences, and sustain customer trust.

Methodology:

The 2026 SRE Report is based on insights gathered from the annual SRE Survey, which was open for six weeks during July and August 2025. The survey received 418 responses from professionals across the globe, representing a wide range of roles and levels of managerial responsibility within reliability engineering.

Respondents were primarily located in North America (68%), followed by Europe (14%) and Asia (13%). Company sizes varied, with 34% of respondents working at organizations with 1,001–10,000 employees and 19% at companies with 10,001–100,000 employees. This diversity ensures that the report captures a broad and comprehensive perspective on the state of site reliability engineering practices worldwide.

The full report is available now as a direct download (no registration required) here.

About Catchpoint, Part of LogicMonitor

Catchpoint is the Internet Performance and Digital Experience Monitoring platform trusted by the world’s leading digital brands to keep their online services fast, reliable, and always available. As part of LogicMonitor, Catchpoint provides real-time visibility into applications, APIs, and Internet performance from thousands of global vantage points, enabling organizations to proactively deliver exceptional digital experiences.

About LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor® is the AI-first hybrid observability platform powering the next generation of digital infrastructure. Powered by Edwin AI, it delivers visibility and actionable intelligence across on-premises, cloud, and edge environments. By predicting issues before they strike and optimizing resources in real time, LogicMonitor helps enterprises protect margins, accelerate innovation, and deliver flawless digital experiences. Visit www.logicmonitor.com and follow LogicMonitor on LinkedIn and X.

Media Contact:
Paige Thornton
LogicMonitor
[email protected]