SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

1. Planning #

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) distinguish themselves from standard alerting and monitoring by focusing strictly on operations that matter to the user.

The Planning Workflow #

Step	Description	Example
1. Operation	A customer-facing operation important enough to warrant an SLO.	A new order is generated, submitted, and acknowledged.
2. SLI (Indicator)	The measurable data needed from the system to compute the SLOs.	Latency in seconds from “order submitted” to “order acknowledged” (derived from logs/telemetry).
3. Aggregation Window	A timeframe meaningful to the business to spot trends/hotspots.	8 hours.
4. Target Reliability	The percentage of success required. (Prod usually > 99%).	90% (for this example).
5. SLO (Objective)	The combination of the Indicator and the Target.	New orders are acknowledged within 1 second and achieve this level of service 90% of the time.

Categories of SLIs #

Based on “Database Reliability Engineering” by Laine Campbell & Charity Majors.

Posts on Mora's blog

SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs

1. Planning #

The Planning Workflow #

Categories of SLIs #