Dashboards tell you how your systems behave. They can’t tell you whether your people understand reliability, value it, use it, or expect it to get better. An independent pulse survey can, and repeating it every quarter shows whether your reliability work is landing.
One-off from $4,500 · quarterly programme $14,400 a year · included in the SRE Maturity and Support Reliability assessments
SLOs, runbooks, and error budgets only work when the people around them understand why they exist and think they’re worth the effort. When that belief is missing, the tooling quietly decays. Alerts get muted, postmortems get skipped, and the error budget becomes a number nobody checks.
Perception also differs sharply by seat. The survey puts each group’s view side by side, so the conversation starts from evidence instead of assumption.
Keeping the core questions fixed is what makes results comparable across teams today and across quarters later.
How well are reliability principles understood? Can people explain an SLO, an error budget, or a blameless review in their own words, or does one team own the vocabulary?
How important do staff feel reliability is? Is it seen as core to the product and the customer, or as a tax on delivery?
How well do staff feel the principles are actually used? Stated values and daily reality usually part ways here, and that’s where the most useful findings sit.
How positive do staff feel about the future of reliability in the organisation? Optimism shows momentum. Cynicism shows what has been promised before.
Each readout shows where perception is strong, where it’s weak, and where groups disagree. The disagreements are often the most valuable part. A gap between how leadership and engineering score practice is worth discussing before it turns up in an incident review.
Re-run the survey each quarter and the trend tells you whether the work is moving the organisation. That turns “we think it’s better” into a number you can take to the board.
Average out of 5. Largest gap: practice. Everyone values reliability, but engineering doesn’t see it being used.
Asking a team with no SRE function about error budget policy produces noise. We pick the version that matches your maturity, and move you up a version as your practice grows.
For organisations without a dedicated reliability practice. Covers shared vocabulary, how incidents are experienced, and whether reliability is anyone’s job.
For organisations with an SRE or platform team still spreading the practice. Covers whether SLOs, alerting, and reviews have reached beyond the team that owns them.
For organisations with an established practice. Covers whether error budgets change decisions, and whether product, support, and leadership share the model.
We agree which business units, teams, and roles to include, and pick the survey version.
Staff answer a short survey run by YourSRE, not by you. An outside party gets more candid answers than an internal form.
We score the four questions overall and by group, and flag where teams and levels see things differently.
You get the results, what they mean, and where to focus. On the quarterly programme, the next survey compares against this baseline.
Most organisations start with the quarterly programme, because a single survey tells you where you are and the trend tells you whether you are getting anywhere.
$4,500single survey
$14,400per year, billed $3,600 each quarter
12-month term, billed quarterly in advance. Renews for another 12 months unless cancelled at least 30 days before renewal. We remind you 60 days ahead.
Start the quarterly programmefrom $150,000per year
After you ask, we reply within one business week, agree scope on a free 30-minute call, and send a fixed quote. A survey takes about five weeks from scoping to readout. Prices exclude tax, larger respondent counts are quoted, and results are reported by group, never by individual.
Staff tell an outside facilitator things they won’t put in an internal survey, especially about leadership follow-through and whether reliability work is actually rewarded. The analysis comes from someone with no stake in which team looks good.
The pulse survey also pairs well with the SRE readiness report. The readiness report assesses how reliability is practised. The pulse survey tells you how it’s perceived. Where the two disagree, you’ll usually find the understanding valley.
Get the free briefing pack: a short, forwardable briefing written for your CTO or CEO. It explains the gap between dashboards and customer experience and proposes the pulse survey as a neutral way to measure it.
Tell us roughly how many people and teams you’d include, and where you think you sit on the maturity path. We’ll recommend a version and send a scope.