Implementing Service Level Objectives

Chapter 17. Reliability Reporting

Alex Hidalgo

At their absolute core, SLOs are a means of providing you with data you can use to have better discussions and therefore (hopefully!) make better decisions. The entire process is fundamentally about thinking about the data you have in ways that you might not have before. The data you collect via an SLO-based approach should be meaningful in terms of being representative of what your users and customers feel and experience every day using your service. Because of this, your SLO data becomes a prime candidate for reporting on your service status to other people.

Who these “other people” are will depend heavily upon your exact service and who its users and stakeholders are, but reporting doesn’t have to just be about presenting quarterly status updates to management and shareholders. Using SLOs to report on the general health of a service to the team or teams that support it is also an incredibly powerful communication method.

Reporting on SLOs is valuable for you, your team, your organization, the teams you depend on, the teams you’re dependent on, external customers, external businesses, and even more. By measuring the performance and reliability of your service from the perspective of your users, you’re also compiling data that can be meaningful directly to those users. And remember: when we say user, we mean literally anyone—or anything—that depends on your service. If your SLIs and SLOs capture their experience and ...