SLOs and SLIs: How do I go about it?

• Sit down with stakeholders and define statements for the critical things they care about.
• Translate those critical paths into SLIs by identifying metrics that matter.
• Establish priority and firm handshakes on adding the required metrics and instrumentation needed to measure these SLIs.
• Negotiate SLO targets with the team so that, once SLIs are in place, rules and alerts can be created.
• With SLOs defined, SLIs implemented, and alerts configured, move on to discussions around short-term and long-term error budgets.

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SLO Statement

“The value for X remains as expected for Y% over Z time-window”

Rationale

“X represents a metric or attribute of key interest because of (specific reason)”

“Y was calculated based on (specific reason)”

“Z is the time-duration considered for X because of (specific reason)”

SLI

The metric that expresses X is: (some valid metric)

This metric is located in: (dataset or monitoring platform) and is sourced from (client or server).

Alert

This metric triggers an alert if the value is over or under X by (threshold) for (defined duration).

This alert is configured at: (location of the alert based on the system).