How Google SREs Use Gemini CLI to Solve Real-World Outages

One of our favorite mottos in Google Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is: "Eliminate Toil."

You hear it in the microkitchens in Zurich and the hallways in Mountain View. This motto refers to the SRE mission of replacing repetitive, manual work with engineered systems. But as a senior SRE once explained, this doesn't just mean writing a script to solve a problem once. It means building the automation that triggers that script at the exact right moment—often the hardest part.

AI has already revolutionized how we write code, but what about how we operate it? Can AI safely solve operational problems? Can it assist operators during a high-pressure outage without taking away control?

In this article, we’ll delve into real scenarios that Google SREs are solving today using Gemini 3 (our latest foundation model) and Gemini CLI—the go-to tool for bringing agentic capabilities to the terminal.

The ...