What are SLOs/SLIs/SLAs?

You’ve likely noticed how some pizza places promise delivery in 30 minutes, or they’ll give you your money back. But what are they really promising? They’re setting a clear performance goal and backing it up with confidence. How do they measure their performance? They track how long each delivery takes. And why do they make this promise? Because fast service is key to keeping their business thriving.

In a similar way, technical service providers strive to deliver the highest possible level of uninterrupted performance to ensure their business success. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams responsible for managing this performance use metrics like SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs. These metrics help them quantify system availability, ensuring reliability and alignment with business goals.

Let’s break down what SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs mean and how Mezmo can help you manage them for achieving operational excellence.

What are SLOs?

A Service-Level Objective (SLO) sets a specific target system availability, defined in percentage over a period of time. For example, if you set an SLO of 99.9% uptime, it indicates that the system should not be down for more than 43.2 minutes in a month.

SLOs are driven by the specific function, target user group, and business objectives. For example, cloud services or shopping sites may require SLOs of 99.99% to ensure business success, while internal applications may work with lower SLOs, such as 99.50%.

What are SLAs?

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a formal contract between a service provider and a customer that documents the specific services the provider will deliver and the performance standards the provider is obligated to maintain. An SLA defines measurable metrics such as uptime, response times, and responsibilities along with the penalties applicable if these standards are not met. 

The availability target specified in an SLA is often set lower than the internal SLO to ensure compliance even under challenging conditions. In the above example, cloud services or ecommerce sites may commit 99.95% availability in the SLAs, while internally setting SLOs of 99.99 %.

What are SLIs?

A Service Level Indicator (SLI) is a metric that measures how well a service meets its SLO over a specified period. For instance, if your SLO is set at 99.95% availability and your SLI measures 99.97%, you are compliant. However, if your SLI falls below 99.95%, you are not compliant. If it falls below the committed value in the SLA, the penalties outlined in the SLA will apply.

To maintain compliance, any downtime must be quickly addressed with an effective incident response plan and the appropriate tools to minimize impact and restore service quickly.

At a Glance

SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs help align business objectives with operational performance. With these metrics, you can define, track, and measure the agreed service availability targets to establish customer trust.

How Mezmo helps you maintain your SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs

Mezmo is a powerful observability platform designed to help SREs collect, centralize, understand, and analyze operational log data in real time, enabling rapid responses to system issues. By providing deep insights into telemetry data, consisting of logs, metrics, and events, Mezmo empowers businesses to effectively monitor system performance, troubleshoot problems, and manage SLOs and SLIs with precision.

Customers have reported an 80% improvement in the time it takes to access and utilize log data with Mezmo, significantly reducing downtime and ensuring compliance with SLAs. Additionally, Mezmo’s Telemetry Pipeline optimizes telemetry data for SLO monitoring tools, making it easier to create intuitive and visual SLI definitions, as showcased in this demo featuring Nobl9, an SLO platform tool.  

Want to know more about how Mezmo can help you identify SLIs and manage your SLOs? Reach out to our Technical Services team today.

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