{"id":32356,"date":"2023-05-11T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-11T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/insidebigdata.com\/?p=32356"},"modified":"2023-05-13T10:55:03","modified_gmt":"2023-05-13T17:55:03","slug":"why-slis-and-slos-are-essential-for-observability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/insidebigdata.com\/2023\/05\/11\/why-slis-and-slos-are-essential-for-observability\/","title":{"rendered":"Why SLIs and SLOs Are Essential for Observability"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If you work in infrastructure technology, chances are you spend a lot of time working with IT operations teams. You\u2019ve watched them invest lots of hard work trying to meet the expectations of the business, but they\u2019ve come away with limited success. The business continually bashes IT for providing poor service, while IT struggles to meet seemingly nebulous expectations with limited resources. The major problem here is the fundamental disconnect over how IT and the business each measure success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IT is responsible for sharing limited resources (such as CPU, memory, and disk) between business functions, so they measure consumption. IT then uses those metrics to recognize when a resource is close to exhaustion to avoid problems and keep costs low. On the other hand, the business needs responsive and error-free services, so they measure success using speed and quality. The disconnect is two teams with drastically different definitions of success, resulting in lots of tension between IT and the business. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you want a simpler and more responsive observability practice, tighter alignment with the business, and faster paths to improvement, you should focus on service level metrics instead. In this article, I\u2019ll introduce two metrics that should matter for your observability practice \u2013 service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs) \u2013 and I\u2019ll show you how to set your SLOs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Service level indicators<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

An SLI<\/strong> is a carefully defined quantitative indicator of some aspect of the level of service that is provided. In other words, an SLI is a metric measuring one thing that shows how well your IT service is performing. An SLI must be relevant to the delivered service and should be simple and easy to understand. In other words, when an SLI goes wrong, there must be some business impact, such as an outage or poor user experience. Remember, the business expects speed and quality, so you need to choose SLIs (metrics) that measure those things, such as:<\/p>\n\n\n\n