slo-sli-guide

SLOs (Service Level Objectives) are targets for reliability; SLIs (Service Level Indicators) are the metrics you measure against them. Define SLIs for critical user journeys—like API latency or availability—set realistic SLO targets based on business requirements, then instrument monitoring to track actual performance against those targets.

Instrument your services with metrics collection (latency, error rate, availability) using tools like Prometheus or cloud-native services. Configure alert rules that trigger when SLI performance approaches SLO thresholds, and pair alerts with runbooks that guide incident response and escalation decisions.

Yes. SLO definitions are platform-agnostic; you can measure and track them across multiple monitoring stacks. Each platform provides different dashboarding and alerting capabilities, so choose based on your existing infrastructure and data sources like metrics, logs, and traces.

Document your critical user journeys, define specific SLIs (response latency percentiles, error rates, availability %), set SLO targets aligned with business needs, specify measurement data sources and collection methods, outline alerting thresholds, and include post-incident runbooks for breach response.

Correlate data from multiple sources: metrics for quantitative SLI measurement, logs for context during incidents, and traces for debugging latency. Integrate these into dashboards and alert rules so you can detect SLO violations quickly and investigate root causes with full observability.

An SLO is your reliability target; your error budget is how much downtime or errors you can tolerate while still meeting it. Use error budgets to make deployment and incident-response decisions: when budget is exhausted, prioritize stability; when available, you can take calculated risks.