Welcome to Your SLO Education Journey

A central hub for teams to learn about Service Level Objectives

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About This Hub

This is a central hub for teams to join the SLO education journey with pages and agents to support your learning. Whether you're new to SLOs or looking to deepen your understanding, you'll find resources here to help you succeed.

What are SLOs?

Service Level Objectives

A Service Level Indicator (SLI) measures a specific aspect of your service — like request success rate or response time. A Service Level Objective (SLO) sets the target for that measure — for example, "99.9% of requests succeed". Together they define what good looks like for your users.

Why SLOs Matter

SLOs help teams balance reliability with innovation, make data-driven decisions, and establish clear expectations with stakeholders about service quality.

Key Benefits

Better incident response, improved prioritization, clearer communication with customers, and a shared understanding of acceptable reliability levels.

SLO Examples in Practice

Good SLOs describe a promise you make to users. Start with a familiar situation, then apply the same thinking to your service.

Availability
99.9%
Coffee shop

A coffee shop opens at 7am every day. If it's locked or broken for more than ~43 minutes a month, regulars stop relying on it and go elsewhere.

Click to see the technical definition →
Availability
99.9%
In technology terms
SLI
% of HTTP requests returning a successful response (2xx/3xx)
Target
99.9% of requests succeed over a 30-day rolling window
Means
At most ~43 minutes of downtime per month before users lose trust
← Click to go back
Latency
< 200ms
Airport security

An airport promises that 95% of passengers clear security in under 10 minutes. A few complex cases take longer, but most travellers get through quickly and make their gate.

Click to see the technical definition →
Latency
< 200ms
In technology terms
SLI
HTTP response time distribution, measured at the 95th percentile
Target
p95 latency < 200ms, measured over a 1-hour window
Means
95% of users get a response in under 200ms — only 1 in 20 requests may be slower
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Error Rate
< 0.1%
Bank ATM network

A bank aims to complete at least 999 out of every 1,000 cash withdrawals successfully. One failed transaction in a thousand is tolerable — more than that and customers start queuing at branches.

Click to see the technical definition →
Error Rate
< 0.1%
In technology terms
SLI
Ratio of failed requests (5xx responses) to total requests
Target
Error rate stays below 0.1% per day
Means
No more than 1 error per 1,000 requests — leaving a small, predictable error budget
← Click to go back

Get Started

1

Learn the Basics

Start by understanding what SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets are and how they work together.

2

Define Your SLOs

Identify the key user journeys and define meaningful SLIs and SLOs for your services.

3

Monitor and Iterate

Implement monitoring, track your error budget, and continuously refine your SLOs based on real-world data.