In the SRE discipline, toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual

, repetitive, automatable, tactical, and devoid of long-term value. Toil tends to scale linearly as the service grows. As such, the SRE discipline strives to reduce toil as much as possible.

Toil and toil budgets closely influence the desire to “measure everything” and “leverage tooling and automation”. By giving operators a quantitative measurement, toil and toil budgets ensure a balance between administering the system and improving it