What is SLO (Service Level Objective)?
An internal target for a service level indicator, defining the goal for reliability.
An SLO (Service Level Objective) is an internal target for an SLI — for example, '99.9% of requests complete in under 200ms, measured over 30 days.' SLOs are used to decide reliability work: if you're comfortably meeting the SLO, you can ship more features; if the error budget is burning fast, you pause feature work and fix reliability. SLOs should be set based on what users actually need — too strict wastes money on over-engineering.
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More Monitoring Terms
AlertManager
Prometheus component that handles alert routing, grouping, and notification delivery.
Error Budget
The acceptable amount of downtime or errors before an SLO is breached.
Grafana
An open-source analytics and visualization platform for metrics, logs, and traces.
Loki
Grafana's horizontally scalable log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus.
Observability
The ability to understand the internal state of a system from its external outputs.
OpenTelemetry
An open-source observability framework for generating metrics, logs, and traces.
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