Define SLO/SLI/SLA

Establish measurable reliability targets with Service Level Objectives, track them with indicators, and manage error budgets.

When to Use

• Defining reliability targets for customer-facing services or APIs
• Establishing clear expectations between service providers and consumers
• Balancing feature velocity with system reliability through error budgets
• Creating objective criteria for incident severity and response
• Migrating from arbitrary uptime goals to data-driven reliability metrics
• Implementing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices
• Measuring and improving service quality over time

Inputs

• Required: Service description and critical user journeys
• Required: Historical metrics data (request rates, latencies, error rates)
• Optional: Existing SLA commitments to customers