SLO Adoption and Usage in Site Reliability Engineering

To realize the full benefits of SRE, organizations need well-thoughtout reliability targets known as service level objectives (SLOs) that are measured by service level indicators (SLIs), a quantitative measure of an aspect of the service. As detailed in the following section, the measurable goals set forth in an organization's SLOs eliminate the conflicts inherent in change management and event handling that cause the pace of innovation to slow and business to suffer.

Understanding how well your service meets expectations also gives managers valuable business perspectives. SLO compliance can inform whether you invest in making your system faster, more available, or more resilient. Or, if your system consistently meets SLOs, you may decide to invest staff time on other priorities, such as new products or features.