Implementing Service Level Objectives

Chapter 6. Getting Buy-In

David K. Rensin

SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets are really helpful mental tools to reason about the reliability needs of your systems. If you want them to be anything more than just interesting talking points, however, you will need to convince your company (or organization) to implement and live by them.

As an engineer, convincing your leaders to adopt SLOs is probably not first nature to you. That’s where this chapter comes in. It will walk you through the steps you should take to get your company ready to live la vida SLO. This information was all learned the hard way by helping others on this journey, and I have compiled the most important bits here so you don’t have to make the same mistakes I made along the way. There is additional discussion about how to get individual teams involved with this process in Chapter 13.

Engineering Is More than Code

We have a saying in SRE: Our monitoring and logging do not decide our reliability; our users do. As technical professionals, the code we write and the systems we design are all in the service of our users. After all, if we build something that nobody ever uses, then we would probably have been better off spending our time and effort doing something else.

Similarly, there is a very robust argument to be made that reliability is the most important requirement of any system, because it is the foundation of user trust. After all, if users don’t trust the system, they won’t use it, and pretty soon there ...