Importance of SLOs

Why SLOs are so important?

• Improve software quality SLOs help define an acceptable level of downtime for a service or a particular issue. SLOs can help on issues that fall short of a full-blown incident, but also don’t fully meet expectations. Using SLOs can help to figure out the balance between innovating (which could result in downtime) and delivering (which ensures users are happy). 

• Help with decision-making SLOs can be a great way for DevOps and infrastructure teams to use data and performance expectations to make decisions. Why are SLO’s important ?

• Promote automation Stable, well-calibrated SLOs pave the way for teams to automate more processes and testing throughout the software delivery life cycle (SDLC). With reliable SLOs, it is possible to set up automation to monitor and measure SLIs and set alerts if certain indicators are trending toward violation. This consistency enables teams to calibrate performance during development and detect issues before SLOs are actually violated.

• Avoid downtime It is inevitable that software can break. SLOs allow DevOps teams to predict the problems before they occur and especially before they impact customers. By shifting production-level SLOs left into development, it is possible to design apps to meet production SLOs to increase resilience and reliability far before there is actual downtime. This trains teams to be proactive in maintaining software quality and saves money by avoiding downtime.

Service Level Objectives (SLOs)

What is an SLO?

A service-level objective (SLO) is a key element of a service-level agreement (SLA) between the service provider and the customer. SLOs are agreed upon as a means of measuring the performance of the Service Provider. The SLA is the entire agreement that specifies what service is to be provided, how it is supported, times, locations, costs, performance, and responsibilities of the parties involved. SLOs are specific measurable characteristics of the SLA.

Example: Availability, Throughput, Frequency, Response time

SLO and SLA are quite similar, however, SLA is usually a weaker target than SLO. SLO is about time and usually answers the following questions: What percentage of time X was able to meet the Y threshold of the Z indicator? Short-term SLOs are important for developers, and SRE teams, while long-term SLOs are important for managing organizations, reviewing goals, and more.

Why SLO?

To develop an effective SLO, understand users' interactions with the service, which are called critical user journeys (CUJs). A CUJ considers the goals of users, and how users use services to accomplish those goals. The CUJ is defined from the perspective of the customer without consideration for service boundaries. 

Examples: 

• Reliability is the most critical feature of any service. A common metric for reliability is uptime, which conventionally means the amount of time a system has been up. 

• More helpful and precise metric is availability. Availability answers the question of whether a system is up but in a more precise way than by measuring the time since a system was down. Availability is often described in terms of nines—such as 99.9% available (three nines), or 99.99% available (four nines). 

Measuring an availability SLO is one of the best ways to measure your system's reliability.

Top Features of Grafana Cloud

What is Grafana Cloud?

Grafana Cloud is a composed platform that provides observability as a service. With Grafana Cloud, it is possible to integrate custom metrics, traces and logs into the Grafana dashboard. Also, without installation overhead, users can use several open-source observability tools like Open Telemetry, Tempo, Prometheus, Loki, and many more.

Log in to the account: https://grafana.com/auth/sign-in?tech=target&pg=prod-cloud&plcmt=hero-btn1&cta=B-login

Building an integrated observability stack from open-source components is a time-consuming process. With Grafana Cloud it is as simple as selecting the service(s) to monitor and installing the Prometheus-inspired agent. This will produce pre-configured alerts and dashboards. Dashboards include live metrics and alerts.

Start for free: https://grafana.com/auth/sign-up/create-user?pg=prod-cloud&plcmt=from-zero-to-obs

The Grafana Cloud offers many ways to collect data, store it, visualize it, and alert users about it.

Features

1. High Scalability

Grafana Cloud is highly scalable with the increasing demands.  It achieves scalability and flexibility with modern distributed systems technologies. It provides true horizontal scalability without artificial limits.

• Scalable beyond 100M metrics

• Retention of metrics for 13 months to analyze trends and plan capacity

• Logs and traces are retained for 30 days

2. Operational efficiency

Grafana Cloud provides an observability platform that is scalable and available, including instant upgrade capability, security patches, and backups.

• Maintenance-free upgrades

• 24-hour on-call support service is guaranteed

• Scalability to support customer growth

3. Flexibility and predictability in pricing

Get unlimited users, metrics, traces, and logs with a 14-day trial of Grafana Cloud Pro. Then the user can select from a free or transparently priced plan.

• 10,000 series for Prometheus or Graphite metrics

• 50 GB of logs

• 50 GB of traces

• 14-day retention for metrics and logs

• Access for up to 3 team members

4. Provides real-time billing dashboards

• Get an estimated bill and detailed breakdown of monthly usage whenever users need it.

• Get notified when usage changes with billing alerts.