Implementing Service Level Objectives

Chapter 15. Discoverable and Understandable SLOs

Alex Hidalgo

An SLO-based approach to reliability works best when everyone is on the same page. You need to ensure that everyone involved within your organization buys into the process in much the same way. Each team should feel free to adapt the system to how they work, what their services are like, and what kinds of data and measurements they have available to them. However, they still need to ensure they’re using terminology and definitions that are consistent with everyone else, so that members of other teams can easily understand them. This is important because when things become too divergent, you lose one of the primary benefits of SLOs: the ability for others to quickly and intuitively discover how you’re defining the reliability of your service, as well as its current state.

In addition to making sure that your SLO definitions are consistent, you need to make sure that others can discover them in the first place. A beautifully crafted, detailed overview of the definitions and statuses of your systems’ SLOs means nothing to others if they can’t find it.

This chapter focuses on best practices and other tips for ensuring your SLOs are as discoverable and understandable as possible.

Understandability

When defining SLOs, you need to make sure they are understandable by anyone who might be involved. This starts with your own team. The SLIs, SLOs, and error budget policies you define need to be agreed upon by everyone ...