SLIs and SLOs Demystified. A workshop approach to building and maintaining your service level indicators and service level objectives

Alexandra F. McCoy

In today's digital landscape, ensuring service reliability is more than just a necessity—it’s a competitive advantage. SLIs and SLOs Demystified equips software engineers, SREs, and business leaders with the knowledge to build, measure, and manage service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs) efficiently. Written by Alexandra F. McCoy—an experienced site reliability engineer with over a decade of experience in the cloud and technology industry—this book simplifies complex reliability concepts for engineers at all levels. Starting with a review of reliability engineering basics, Alexandra provides a step-by-step approach to defining impactful SLIs, facilitating productive SLO discussions, and integrating observability into your monitoring strategy. You'll also see how these principles apply to web applications, distributed systems, databases, and new features through real-world examples that can help you develop SLIs and SLOs for your specific environment. The book goes beyond implementation to explore the financial impact of reliability, alerting strategies, integration with incident management, and using error budgets for business decisions.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to drive operational excellence, minimize unplanned downtime, and optimize end user experiences with well-established reliability metrics.