The Rise of the Modern SRE: How Code-Savvy Engineers Are Powering Reliable VMware Workloads

Carl Ramkarran
Senior Product Manager - Public Cloud
When uptime equals revenue, organizations running critical workloads on VMware infrastructure need more than just solid virtualization—they need operational excellence. That’s where Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Observability, and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) come in. Together, they form a powerful framework for enabling performance, scalability, and resilience.
Fortunately, modern Site Reliability Engineers aren’t just infrastructure experts—they’re application-savvy engineers who understand code as deeply as they understand systems. And this dual skill set is what makes them so effective.
SRE: Where infrastructure and application expertise converge
In the past, developers and operations teams worked in silos. Not anymore. In modern SRE environments—especially those built on VMware—the walls are gone.
Modern SREs combine systems engineering and software development skills to automate, scale, and optimize infrastructure while understanding how the application behaves at runtime. This dual expertise enables them to:
- Write code to improve reliability (e.g., self-healing scripts, automation pipelines).
- Understand application architectures (monoliths, microservices, etc.).
- Collaborate directly with developers to define and enforce service-level objectives.
- Use code-level insights to drive infrastructure decisions.
When workloads are running on VMware, this hybrid skill set means SREs can work across layers—from the hypervisor and virtual machines (VMs) to the application stack—to troubleshoot, optimize, and proactively manage reliability.
Observability: Turning monitoring into insight
In VMware environments, there’s a rich ecosystem of telemetry—from vSphere, vCenter, and ESXi, to the applications running inside your VMs. But monitoring alone isn’t enough.
SREs need observability—the ability to ask open-ended questions and explore unknown-unknowns. Thanks to their application fluency, SREs can instrument both infrastructure and application layers using tools like OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana to track:
- VM and host resource utilization.
- Application metrics like latency, request volume, and error rates.
- Business-specific metrics related to features or deployments.
- Traces that follow requests across microservices, VMs, and containers.
With this full-spectrum visibility, SREs can pinpoint whether a performance degradation stems from a noisy neighbor on a host, a code regression, or a database query gone rogue.
This end-to-end visibility is crucial for managing complex VMware environments.
APM: Connecting code to performance on VMware
APM tools are a critical part of the observability toolbox. While VMware can tell you about CPU, memory, and disk I/O, only APM tools can trace what’s happening inside the application.
For SREs with a background in development, this is where their expertise shines:
- They can dive into transaction traces, understand stack traces, and interpret exceptions.
- They know the difference between a thread pool saturation and a memory leak.
- They can work alongside development teams to optimize code paths, reduce latency, or refactor bottlenecks.
Tools like Datadog, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and New Relic allow SREs to connect user-facing performance issues back to code-level causes—all within the context of VMware-managed infrastructure.
Bringing it all together for a modern approach to reliability on VMware
To thrive in VMware environments, organizations need more than just vSphere dashboards and uptime reports. They need a holistic approach that blends:
Discipline | Role in VMware Workloads |
SRE | Brings software engineering to operations, automates reliability. |
Observability | Offers end-to-end visibility across VMs, hypervisors, and apps. |
APM | Provides deep insight into code-level performance and errors. |
The modern SRE, armed with both infrastructure know-how and application development expertise, is uniquely positioned to unify these disciplines. They don’t just respond to alerts—they build systems that don’t break. And they don’t just monitor—they observe and act.
If you’re running workloads on VMware and aiming for enterprise-grade reliability, investing in SRE practices, observability tooling, and APM integration isn’t optional—it’s essential.
Ensono can help you turn reliability into a competitive advantage
Ensono’s SRE-as-a-Service (SREaaS) offering is designed to help you get there. Our experts bring deep VMware and application experience to the table, helping you implement automation, gain full-stack visibility, and resolve performance issues before they impact users.
Get in touch to learn more: Connect with Ensono – Contact Us Today | Ensono
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Why do we need SREs if we already have DevOps?
While DevOps focuses on collaboration and automation across development and operations, SREs bring a software engineering mindset to reliability. They write code to improve system resilience, define service-level objectives, and proactively manage performance—especially critical in complex VMware environments.
2. What makes a modern SRE different from a traditional operations engineer?
Modern SREs are code-savvy engineers who understand both infrastructure and application behavior. They don’t just monitor systems—they build them to be self-healing, scalable, and observable. This dual expertise is essential for managing today’s hybrid and virtualized workloads.
3. How do observability and APM tools help in VMware environments?
Observability tools provide end-to-end visibility across virtual machines, hypervisors, and applications. APM tools go deeper, offering code-level insights into performance issues. Together, they help SREs quickly diagnose and resolve problems—before users are impacted.
4. What outcomes can we expect from investing in SRE practices?
Organizations that embrace SRE see improvements in uptime, deployment velocity, and incident response. They also gain better alignment between engineering and business goals, thanks to measurable reliability targets and proactive system design.
5. How can Ensono help us build or scale our SRE capabilities?
Ensono’s SRE-as-a-Service (SREaaS) offering brings experienced engineers, proven frameworks, and modern tooling to your VMware environment. Whether you’re starting from scratch or scaling an existing team, we help you embed reliability into your infrastructure and applications—without the overhead of building it all in-house.
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