Incident management for high-velocity teams
What is a service-level objective (SLO)? SLO vs. SLA vs. SLI
Creating a positive user experience is essential when you’re providing a service, and that starts with accountability. As a service provider, it’s your job to make sure your customers are getting the quality of service they expect from your company.
When you make a promise to a customer, you need a way to measure your performance and determine whether you have delivered on that commitment. This is where the different service levels, specifically SLOs, come into play.
You may have heard about SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs before, but what exactly is an SLO? Discover the meaning of SLO and how it can help you deliver the best possible service to your customers.
What is an SLO?
A service level objective (SLO) is an internal target you set to ensure the services you deliver meet customers’ expectations. These customer expectations are outlined in service level agreements (SLAs), agreements between you and the customer.
You might be wondering what an SLO looks like in practice. Let’s use a streaming service as an example. If you provide a video streaming service through your website, you might include 99.9% uptime in your SLAs. This means your streaming service can only be down for about 43.2 minutes per month.
SLOs play a key role here by allowing you to set internal goals reflecting your promises to customers. When you have SLOs, teams can be accountable for issues and identify and resolve them before they affect the customer experience.
Components of an SLO
An SLO has three primary components: metric, target, and time window. The metric is a measurable number, such as downtime or latency, while the target is the specific number you’re trying to achieve, for example, 99.9% downtime. The time window indicates how long it takes to measure the metric, ranging from a month to a year.
When you have a target and metric you’re tracking for a specific period, you can concretely measure your performance. This speeds up the incident response process, allowing you to resolve potential service issues before they affect customers.
SLO vs. SLA vs. SLI
SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs are all different but closely tied together. The process begins with an SLA that you and the customer agree to. For example, you might commit to responding to customer support inquiries within 24 hours.
To meet this commitment, you would define an SLO as: “Responding to customer support inquiries within 24 hours for a given period, such as 90% of the time in a given month.”
You’re targeting the SLI, which is customer support response time in this example.
Service level objective (SLO)
An SLO (service level objective) defines a target value for a particular metric over a set period of time. A real-world example of an SLO is 99.99% uptime over 30 days. As a result, you’d need to measure the downtime your service experiences over a month to ensure it’s less than 4.32 minutes.
Service level agreement (SLA)
An SLA (service level agreement) is an agreement between the provider and client that outlines measurable metrics, such as uptime, response time, and specific responsibilities.
These agreements are usually created by a company’s legal and business development teams and represent formal commitments to customers and the consequences if you fail to live up to those promises. Typically, consequences include financial penalties, service credits, or license extensions.
SLIs are the metric you’re targeting in your SLO, which is an internal objective you set and measure to track your performance. You create these SLOs to satisfy SLAs, which are agreements you’ve made between your service and the customers who use it.
In Jira Service Management, you can quickly create SLAs, which allow you to set internal objectives based on those agreements.
Service level indicator (SLI)
An SLI (service level indicator) measures the actual compliance with an SLO. For example, if your SLA guarantees 99.95% uptime, your SLO might reflect the same target. Your SLI, then, is the actual measurement of your uptime, which could be 99.9% or 99.95%. To remain in compliance with your SLA, the SLI must meet or exceed the promises outlined in that document.
Error budgets
Error budgets are crucial in SLOs because you can’t focus exclusively on ensuring your service is always available. While uptime is essential, you must find time to innovate and update your product. Your error budget tells you how much room for error you have, which lets you know how much you can experiment and innovate.
If your SLO is 99.99% uptime over 30 days, you have approximately 4 minutes of allowable downtime within those 30 days. This empowers agile teams to innovate without compromising service agreements.
How do SLOs work?
Let’s examine a simple example of an SLO to provide a clearer understanding of how they work.
Begin by identifying the key metrics you want to track. Uptime is typically one of the most critical metrics, but you can also use metrics like incident management times, correctness, and throughput. In this example, we’ll use downtime as the key metric.
If your SLA includes a 99.9% uptime guarantee, your SLO should reflect that. Aiming for 99.9% uptime over 30 days means you’re limited to 43.2 minutes of downtime over a month. You can use uptime monitoring services to track your uptime and downtime throughout the month.
At the end of the month, you can determine whether you’ve met or missed your SLO. If you miss your SLO, it’s essential to investigate and correct the cause of the issue. Your error budget will also be affected, although the impact will vary depending on incident severity levels.
Why are SLOs important?
SLOs are key in ensuring you deliver the best service to your customers. SLOs don’t just result in a better customer experience; they also improve performance, enhance collaboration, and simplify planning.
Aligns teams around goals
Teamwork is essential when delivering the best services to your customers. When you set clear expectations with SLOs, your product, engineering, and business teams have shared targets they can focus on. Having a shared benchmark that everyone can work together to achieve keeps teams united and working toward a single goal—providing a better service to your customers.
Improves products and customer experience
When you’re delivering a product or service, the customer experience is what matters. Innovative companies use SLOs to provide better products and services to customers, whether that involves minimizing downtime for a streaming service or enhancing incident communication and response times. SLOs also help you identify service issues before they impact your customers, so you can fix them when it counts.
Increases automation
Automation is one of the biggest trends in IT service management (ITSM). It saves businesses time and money while delivering a better customer experience. SLOs support automated monitoring and alerts, allowing you to track uptime and other key metrics constantly.
To compete in today's business world, automation is a must. Automating repetitive tasks reduces the need for manual work, saving you time and money while minimizing the risk of human error.
Reduces downtime
Downtime isn’t just bad for business—it creates a negative customer experience that may lead customers to competitors. SLOs allow you to measure reliability with simple, concrete metrics, so you can monitor downtime and fix the issues that cause it. Error budgets help teams balance innovation and reliability by clarifying how much risk they can take.
SLOs best practices
While SLOs can be beneficial, following some simple best practices can help simplify DevOps and maximize the benefits of SLOs. Here are some tips:
- Support your SLA: Your SLO should support your SLA, so you can track and optimize metrics like downtime to ensure you’re meeting the service agreement you made with your customers.
- Keep it simple: Defining a long list of SLOs might seem like a good idea, but it’s better to keep it simple and focus on the metrics that matter.
- Adapt: SLOs aren’t set in stone, so don’t be afraid to adjust them to meet your customers’ changing needs.
Manage SLOs with Jira Service Management
SLOs are a powerful resource if you know how to use them. By creating SLOs that align with your SLAs, you can ensure that you deliver the best service and customer experience. Minimizing downtime and reducing response times leads to improved overall service.
With Jira Service Management, you can easily create SLAs and SLOs to guide your software development and IT teams. Jira even allows teams to collaborate in real time, enhancing productivity and collaboration. Discover how Jira Service Management can help you get started with SLOs.
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