{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "bskyPostRef": {
    "cid": "bafyreiatlfki36ioy465cfoam5wyl4edvmw3wzl4icvejg6acscbqvzkha",
    "uri": "at://did:plc:5sgu76a53rz3n6unbykmovqy/app.bsky.feed.post/3mlofjcmr77c2"
  },
  "description": "A Service Level Objective (SLO) is an internal target for a service's reliability, expressed as a percentage over a window (for example, 99.9% of requests succeed within 300 ms over a rolling 28-day window). SLOs anchor the practice of Site Reliability Engineering by making reliability concrete, measurable, and tradable against feature velocity.\n\n\nRelated terms in the SLI/SLO/SLA family\n\n * SLI (Service Level Indicator). The actual measurement, for example the ratio of successful requests to tot",
  "path": "/engineering-glossary/slo-service-level-objective/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-12T18:16:37.000Z",
  "site": "https://sahilkapoor.com",
  "tags": [
    "SLI",
    "Observability",
    "Metrics",
    "Prometheus",
    "Grafana"
  ],
  "textContent": "**A Service Level Objective (SLO)** is an internal target for a service's reliability, expressed as a percentage over a window (for example, 99.9% of requests succeed within 300 ms over a rolling 28-day window). SLOs anchor the practice of Site Reliability Engineering by making reliability concrete, measurable, and tradable against feature velocity.\n\n## Related terms in the SLI/SLO/SLA family\n\n  * **SLI (Service Level Indicator).** The actual measurement, for example the ratio of successful requests to total requests over a window.\n  * **SLO (Service Level Objective).** The target the SLI must hit, set by the team responsible for the service.\n  * **SLA (Service Level Agreement).** A contractual commitment to customers, usually weaker than the internal SLO so there is a safety margin.\n\n\n\n## Error budgets\n\nThe complement of an SLO is the **error budget** : the amount of failure permitted by the SLO. A 99.9% availability SLO leaves a 0.1% error budget, roughly 43 minutes per month. The error budget is a quota: while it has room, the team can ship faster and take more risk; once depleted, the team prioritises reliability work over features. This frames reliability as a continuous business decision rather than a binary up/down state.\n\n## Common tooling\n\n  * Nobl9, Cortex SLO, Sloth (open source), Datadog SLOs, New Relic SLM, Grafana SLO\n\n\n\n🔗\n\n**Related Terms**\nSLI, Observability, Metrics, Prometheus, Grafana.",
  "title": "SLO",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-13T19:15:00.195Z"
}