sitereliability.consultingGenerating a Report
After completing the self-assessment wizard, clicking View Results takes you to the results screen. This page explains each section of the results screen and how to export the summary report.
The results screen
The results screen has five sections, each surfacing a different view of your reliability posture. Work through them in order the first time — each section adds context to the one before it.
Overall grade
The grade hero at the top of the results screen shows:
- A letter grade (A through F) with a corresponding background colour
- A percentage score — the weighted average of all answered axes, expressed as a percentage
- A 4.0-scale average — the same score on the 0–4 scale used throughout the framework
- The number of axes answered out of the total 192
The grade thresholds are calibrated against the dataset of real-world incidents:
| Grade | Threshold |
|---|---|
| A | ≥ 87% |
| B | ≥ 75% |
| C | ≥ 60% |
| D | ≥ 45% |
| F | < 45% |
Skipped axes are excluded from the calculation — they do not count as zero. A partial assessment produces a valid grade for the sub-domains that were answered. If you skipped a significant number of sub-domains, the grade reflects only the areas you assessed; return to the wizard via Restart and complete the skipped sub-domains for a more representative result.
Domain scores
The domain scores section shows a horizontal bar for each of the 11 domains, representing that domain's percentage score across all its answered sub-domains. The bars are colour-coded using each domain's assigned colour.
Longer bars are better. Very short bars — particularly for Infrastructure, Database, or Code — deserve immediate attention, as these domains carry the highest weight in the overall grade and are the most frequent primary causes of production incidents.
Use this section to identify your two or three weakest domains. These are the right places to begin your remediation planning.
Axis summary
The axis summary shows three bars — Detection, Mitigations, and Response — each displaying the average score across all answered sub-domains on that axis, expressed on the 0–4 scale.
This is one of the most important views in the results screen. The industry-wide averages from the SRF incident dataset are:
| Axis | Industry average |
|---|---|
| Detection | 1.8 / 4.0 |
| Mitigations | 1.1 / 4.0 |
| Response | 1.6 / 4.0 |
The gap between Detection and Mitigations is the most important pattern the framework was designed to surface. If your Mitigations bar is substantially lower than your Detection bar — even if both are above the industry average — your architecture is telling you something: you are investing in watching things break rather than building systems that absorb failures before they reach users.
A Mitigations score below 1.5 with a Detection score above 2.0 is the most common profile seen in practice. It indicates an organisation that has mature monitoring but underinvested architectural resilience. The remediation path is architectural — more monitoring will not improve this profile.
Reliability radar
The radar (spider) chart plots domain scores in circular form, with each domain occupying a spoke. The further a point sits from the centre, the stronger that domain's score.
The radar is most useful for identifying structural imbalances at a glance. A collapsed spoke — a domain that pulls significantly inward compared to its neighbours — shows a concentrated weakness. Multiple collapsed spokes in adjacent domains (for example, Infrastructure and Deployment both pulling inward) often indicate a shared root cause: a team that is stretched, a platform that has been deprioritised, or a gap in ownership.
Use the radar chart when presenting results to technical leadership — it communicates the shape of the problem at a glance, without requiring the audience to read numbers.
Top Improvement Areas
The final section lists the seven lowest-scoring sub-domains from your assessment. Each entry shows:
- The sub-domain name and parent domain
- Colour-coded axis pills indicating which axes (Detection, Mitigations, or Response) are the weakest for that sub-domain
These seven sub-domains are the highest-priority candidates for remediation. They represent the places where capability gaps are most acute and where targeted investment will produce the greatest score improvement.
For context on what each sub-domain covers — what the controls mean in practice and what good looks like — refer to the Failure Domains section of the framework documentation.
Exporting the summary report
The grade hero contains two action buttons: Restart and Export Summary.
Clicking Export Summary immediately downloads a plain-text file named SRF-Assessment-YYYY-MM-DD.txt (with today's date in the filename). The file contains:
- The assessment date and overall score/grade
- The number of axes answered
- Per-domain percentage scores
This format is deliberately simple. It is suitable for:
- Sharing with non-technical stakeholders (executives, board members, procurement teams) who need a high-level reliability snapshot
- Filing alongside compliance evidence for SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar programmes
- Providing to an assessor as a baseline before a professional attestation engagement
- Attaching to a board or risk committee report as a one-page reliability summary
Limitations of the summary export
The .txt summary gives domain-level percentages. It does not list the specific capabilities that are missing.
For a capability-level gap list — one line per missing capability, formatted as a Markdown checklist ready to import into a backlog or ticketing tool — use Export Backlog. The next page explains what that export produces and how to use it.