slo-implementation

SLIs are metrics measuring user-perceived reliability—such as successful request rates or latency percentiles. SLOs are targets you set for those SLIs, like 99.9% availability over 28 days. Define SLIs using PromQL queries in Prometheus, then establish SLO targets based on business needs and user expectations.

Error budgets represent the acceptable failure rate within your SLO window. Calculate remaining budget as (1 - SLO target) × time window. Configure Prometheus recording rules to track burn rate, then set multi-window burn rate alerts that fire when error budget depletes too quickly, enabling proactive response before breaching SLOs.

SLO-based alerting uses multi-window burn rate rules in Prometheus to detect when your error budget is burning faster than sustainable. Configure recording rules for your SLI, define burn rate thresholds, and create alert policies that trigger on short and long window burn rates, preventing SLO violations before they occur.

Yes. Prometheus supports both availability SLIs—tracked via successful HTTP request ratios—and latency SLIs—measured using histogram percentiles. Write PromQL queries to aggregate these metrics over your SLO window, then use Prometheus dashboards to visualize SLI compliance and error budget consumption.

Implement SLOs when you need to align reliability targets with user expectations and inform development velocity decisions. SLOs are essential for establishing accountability, managing error budgets across teams, and triggering reliability work when budgets risk depletion.

Define SLIs for each service using Prometheus recording rules and PromQL. Create YAML alerting policies specifying burn rate thresholds and notification channels. Integrate results into dashboards for centralized SLO compliance tracking, enabling cross-service reliability visibility and coordinated incident response.