Implementing Service Level Objectives

Book excerpt: Although service-level objectives (SLOs) continue to grow in importance, there’s a distinct lack of information about how to implement them. Practical advice that does exist usually assumes that your team already has the infrastructure, tooling, and culture in place. In this book, recognized SLO expert Alex Hidalgo explains how to build an SLO culture from the ground up. Ideal as a primer and daily reference for anyone creating both the culture and tooling necessary for SLO-based approaches to reliability, this guide provides detailed analysis of advanced SLO and service-level indicator (SLI) techniques. Armed with mathematical models and statistical knowledge to help you get the most out of an SLO-based approach, you’ll learn how to build systems capable of measuring meaningful SLIs with buy-in across all departments of your organization. Define SLIs that meaningfully measure the reliability of a service from a user’s perspective Choose appropriate SLO targets, including how to perform statistical and probabilistic analysis Use error budgets to help your team have better discussions and make better data-driven decisions Build supportive tooling and resources required for an SLO-based approach Use SLO data to present meaningful reports to leadership and your users