97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 67. Create Your Supporting Artifacts

Daria Barteneva and Eva Parish

Microsoft Squarespace

Don’t underestimate the power of documentation to support you and your organization during SLO implementation. Your goal is to break down SLO creation into three phases: define the SLO, collect SLIs, and, later, use the SLO. Here is a list of the documentation we recommend at this stage:

One-page strategy document

This will be the most important document in the crawl phase. What are you trying to accomplish? Why? How? This will be the very first document you share with people when they ask, “What is this effort all about?” Make it short enough for anyone to read in less than 10 minutes. It’s critical that you get this document right. Use this book as a resource to help you articulate why your organization needs SLOs: what it will get out of creating SLOs, and how SLOs will improve service reliability for your users and help your engineering teams. Make sure you review this document with your leadership and have its sign-off and total support for the strategy you plan to communicate across your organization.

Two pages defining SLOs (high level)

Next, you’ll need a more detailed (but still brief) document that explains what an SLO is, gives examples of good SLOs, and tells the reader ...