Service Level Objective (SLO)
What it is
An SLO sets a target for a measurable service indicator, such as availability or latency, over a time window. The gap between the target and 100% is the error budget.
Why it matters
SLOs give engineering a shared definition of 'reliable enough'. Support ticket trends are a useful check on whether the SLOs reflect what customers feel.
Best practices
- Measure what customers experience – Not just server health.
- Spend the error budget deliberately – Use it to ship faster when you have room.
- Compare with ticket data – If tickets spike while SLOs look fine, the SLO is measuring the wrong thing.
How Decimal helps
Decimal's investigations show which customer-reported problems trace back to reliability issues, adding a customer-side signal to your SLOs.