"Making Our Life Less Monotonous" or "Just Tick Things Off": An Exploratory Multi-Method Study of Toil

Google introduced Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) as a DevOps approach focused on service reliability. A key concept in SRE is toil defined as manual, repetitive, automatable, and reactive tasks that arise in production service management, scale with service growth, and provide no lasting value. As SRE adoption expands beyond Google, organisations adapt SRE practices and terminology, leading to inconsistencies in how toil is defined and perceived.