Q: Your team spends 60% of its time on repetitive operational tasks (restarting services, rotating logs, provisioning VMs). In SRE terms, what is this called, and how do you reduce it?

In SRE, this is called Toil—manual, repetitive, automatable, reactive work that scales linearly with service size and adds no enduring value.

• Automate repetitive tasks:
• Service restarts → Systemd auto-restart with Restart=on-failure
• Log rotation → Properly configured logrotate or journald limits
• VM provisioning → Terraform/Ansible Infrastructure as Code
• Self-healing systems:
• Health check endpoints with automatic remediation
• Kubernetes liveness/readiness probes that auto-restart unhealthy pods

Google's SRE book recommends keeping toil below 50% of an SRE team's time. The remaining 50%+ should be spent on engineering work that reduces future toil. Strategies to reduce toil: The key insight: Toil isn't inherently bad—it's bad when it grows faster than the team and prevents reliability improvements.

• Auto-scaling groups that replace failed instances
• Reduce ticket-driven work:
• Self-service portals for common requests (database access, environment creation)
• ChatOps bots for routine operations
• Measure and track: Categorize each operational task as toil or engineering. Report toil percentage weekly. If toil exceeds 50%, escalate to management and prioritize automation projects.