DevOps Without SREs: Why Firefighting Never Ends - and How to Fix It

If you’re a DevOps engineer at a mid-size SaaS company, chances are you don’t have a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team backing you up.

• If you’ve worked at a larger company before, you already know what that means: you’re carrying your own job plus the invisible SRE workload.
• If you’ve never had an SRE on your side, you may not realize just how much extra weight you’re shouldering. This post will help you recognize that hidden burden and show you how to turn it into a path toward stronger reliability.

Either way, the result is the same: features get delayed, firefighting takes over, context-switching becomes routine, and reliability remains fragile - feeling like once incident away from collapse.

Let’s unpack what that hidden burden looks like — and how you can lighten it without adding headcount.

This post explores what that hidden burden looks like, why firefighting never seems to end and how a Lean‑In‑the‑Flow‑of‑Work (LIFOW) approach can give you SRE‑level guidance without hiring an SRE team.

What an SRE Actually Does

If you have been part of a larger organization that could afford SREs, you already know exactly the load/burden you are managing.

For the rest of you who have not, be ready to open your eyes on everything you are accountable for. In larger orgs, Site Reliability Engineers aren’t just “extra ops hands.” They play two critical roles:

• Advisory → Reviewing projects at inception, guiding observability design, and training teams on best practices.
• Compliance → Acting as the final gate before production, ensuring standards are met, and keeping an eye on reliability across services.

They are both your guide and your safety net.

The Reality for Mid-Size SaaS DevOps Without SREs

When there's no SRE team, DevOps engineers end up wearing both hats. They become their own reliability advisors, running reviews at project inception and being on call when incidents hit.

This creates predictable problems:

• Every project reinvents the reliability wheel. Without a central playbook, each team builds its own monitoring and alerting strategy, leading to inconsistent coverage and blind spots.
• Best practices are uneven. Some services have solid observability, others have blind spots - making it harder to identify failures root causes.
• Firefighting replaces prevention. When outages hit, DevOps spend hours just figuring out what broke.
• The burden doesn’t scale. Even if you hired one SRE, they can't be everywhere; the work of advising, reviewing and incident response spans every team.

In short: DevOps ends up doing the job of ten SREs - but with no dedicated time, structure or support to do so.

But what are the underlying consequences on the product and the team?

The Hidden Cost of DevOps Without SREs

This invisible tax shows up in three painful ways:

• Feature development slows → DevOps pause shipping to work on reliability until SLOs (Service-Level Objectives) are met.
• Reliability remains fragile → Without consistent practices, issues recur and post‑mortems don’t translate into long‑term improvements. Effective observability reduces downtime by enabling teams to detect and address issues as they occur.
• Teams burn out → Engineers juggle building, deploying, monitoring, and firefighting. Best-in-class observability can turn this into a smoother, proactive process that reduces firefighting and boosts team velocity

And customers notice. For SaaS, downtime is more than an inconvenience — it’s a trust killer.

Learn In the Flow of Work (LIFOW): A Smarter Approach

This is where Digitam comes in. We built Digitam to give DevOps teams the benefits of SRE-level guidance — without needing a dedicated SRE team or spend weeks in training.

Instead of endless reliability strategy sessions or manual reliability reviews, Digitam works directly in the flow of your actual work:

• ✅ Automated checks before production and throughout the service lifecycle → compliance baked into pipelines.
• ✅ Prioritized action lists → know exactly what to fix first, across all teams and environments.
• ✅ Step-by-step remediation tutorials → each action includes expert guidance on the how-to so you don’t waste time reinventing the fix.
• ✅ Learning by doing → every remediation strengthens your system while teaching DevOps only what they need - nothing extra.

This is LIFOW (Learn In the Flow Of Work): SRE-level guidance embedded in your workflow - where and when you need it.

Why This Matters Now

If your SaaS company has already been through a painful outage, you know how costly firefighting can be.
If you haven’t — it’s only a matter of time.

The choice is simple:

• Keep relying on DevOps to carry advisory + compliance alone (unsustainable), or
• Embed a scalable system that brings consistency, guidance and efficiency across every project.

From MTTR Wins to Scaling Reliability

The USDA Forest Service showed what’s possible with Datadog: cutting MTTR by 60% through stronger observability. That’s the kind of efficiency every SaaS team dreams of.

But they didn’t do it alone; they had a Managed Services Provider (MSP) acting as their SRE team. This case study illustrates what’s possible when you pair observability with dedicated reliability guidance.

But most mid-size SaaS companies can't afford that.

So who drives the work in companies without SREs or MSP? Right now, it’s DevOps carrying the bulk of the load — and they’re stretched thin.

Digitam closes that gap by bringing the same principle of efficiency to reliability itself: automating reviews, surfacing remediation steps, and embedding best practices directly into DevOps workflows.

Just as observability shrinks MTTR, Digitam shrinks the hidden “SRE tax” on your organization.

The results? DevOps can spend more time shipping features, and less time fighting fires.

Take the Next Step

Want to reduce firefighting and cut MTTR without hiring an SRE team?

👉 Start your free trial of Digitam today and see how Lean In the Flow of Work transforms reliability for mid-size SaaS.

Or, if you’re not ready to dive in, test-drive our 👉 Free Monitors Explorer to uncover quick wins in your existing Monitoring setup.

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