Service level objectives

Define and track reliability targets for your services with service level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets to balance reliability with innovation velocity.

Overview

SLOs help to define measurable reliability targets for your services. By setting SLOs based on availability, latency, or custom metrics, you can track how well your services meet user expectations and make data-driven decisions about reliability investments.

With Instana, you can create SLOs, monitor error budgets, and alert when objectives are at risk. You can balance the need for reliability with the desire to release new features quickly. If you have some error budget, you can move faster; if you are running out of budget, it's time to focus on stability.

Key features

Service level objectives include the following key features:

  • Flexible service level indicator (SLI) definitions: Create SLIs based on availability, latency, throughput, or custom metrics.
  • Error budget tracking: Monitor the cost of unreliability.
  • Burn rate alerts: Get notified when you're using the error budget too quickly.
  • Historical analysis: Track SLO compliance over time to identify trends.
  • Multi-window SLOs: Define different objectives for different time windows (daily, weekly, monthly).
  • Dashboard integration: Visualize SLO status and error budgets on dashboards.

Common use cases

See the following example use cases:

SLA compliance
Set internal SLOs stricter than external service level agreements (SLAs) so that you can meet customer commitments. Track compliance and get early warnings before SLA violations.
Release decision-making
Use error budget status to decide whether to release new features or focus on reliability. If you have some budget, deploy confidently; if not, prioritize stable work.
Team accountability
Define clear reliability targets for each team. Track SLO compliance to measure team performance and identify areas that need improvement.
Incident prioritization
Prioritize incidents based on SLO impact. Focus on issues that threaten SLO compliance and defer less critical problems when error budget allows.

Where to find it in the UI

You can access service level objectives from the following locations in the UI:

  • SLO list: Click Service levels in the navigation panel, then select the Service level objectives tab to see all SLOs with their entity type, blueprint, error budget, and status.
  • SLO details: Click any SLO name in the list to view detailed compliance metrics, error budget trends, and historical data.
  • Custom dashboard widgets: Add SLO widgets to custom dashboards by opening a custom dashboard, clicking Add Widget, and selecting SLO in the dialog navigation panel.
  • Application perspective: View SLOs associated with a specific application from the application's perspective page.
  • Service dashboard: See SLO status for individual services from the service's dashboard.

What problems does this solve?

Service level objectives address the following common reliability management challenges:

  • Unclear reliability targets: Define measurable objectives instead of vague reliability goals.
  • Over-engineering: Avoid building for 100% reliability when 99.9% is sufficient.
  • Release anxiety: Make confident release decisions based on error budget status.
  • Reactive operations: Get proactive alerts before SLO violations occur.
  • Misaligned priorities: Align team efforts around shared reliability objectives.

Related capabilities

The following capabilities work together with service level objectives:

Learn more

For detailed information about SLOs, error budgets, and best practices, see Service level objectives documentation.