The most common SLO blunders and how to avoid them

Common SLO pitfalls and how to avoid them

Today’s internet services demand a near-perfect uptime. The requirement for DevOps teams to maintain the performance and stability of essential business systems is growing due to this demand. Using service-level objectives (SLOs), service-level agreements, and service-level indicators to assess and measure software performance within error budgets is an excellent way for teams to analyze and measure software performance that stays within error budgets. However, there are some SLO dangers to be aware of. As a result, it’s critical to avoid these frequent pitfalls while designing your SLOs, leading to extra hassles for your DevOps staff.

Pitfall 1: SLOs not aligned with your business goals

Creating an SLO that is not linked with your business goals or a service level agreement is a standard error (SLA). It might be a pointless distraction that takes time away from more critical duties. For example, a bank’s IT staff wishes to ensure that an application has 99.9% service availability with a 50ms latency for a trailing 30-day period with no revenue impact. Setting a strict SLO for a non-business-critical application can result in wasted time and money for fixing problems or executing operations to assure uptime.

It is best to evaluate or adjust an SLO if it is unrelated to a critical business objective or external SLAs. Managing SLOs for customer-facing, revenue-generating, high-visibility applications is the best investment. Consistent SLO violations of service availability for the check deposit application, for example, would cause customer discontent and possibly revenue loss.

Pitfall 2: SLOs with no ownership or accountability

Who do you call when SLOs are broken? Whose property is it? When violations occur, SLOs defined by high management without buy-in from appropriate development, operations, and SRE stakeholders can result in finger-pointing, blaming, and chaotic war chambers. Compared to an SLO with an owner and a well-defined remediation process, a broken SLO with no owner can take longer to fix and is more likely to repeat.

To avoid orphaned SLOs, ensure that critical stakeholders collaborate extensively during the formulation of SLOs and that they are validated, viable, and agreed upon. Establish the critical service-level indicators (SLIs) that must monitor, the method for resolving any issues, the necessary tools, and resolution timescales. Before your team adopts an SLO, you should discuss and agree on these issues.

Pitfall 3: Using SLOs reactively vs. proactively

Typically, teams create SLOs because they follow industry best practices or share them. However, many people are unaware of the commercial goal to which it is linked. IT staff in these firms may ignore SLOs until they are broken, at which point individual owners scurry to fix the problem. It is reactive, reducing the value SLOs provide to an organization in terms of application health, reliability, and resiliency. Reacting to infractions does not prevent them from repeating in the future, but it does take time away from your developers.

Start the SLO discussion early in the design process to avoid this. Encourage SLO evaluation to be part of the CI/CD process rather than simply in production. Ensure that error budgets are set up and tracked, with alerts and root cause analysis, so that development teams can identify and address issues before they become problems or cause violations.

Pitfall 4: SLO thresholds that are too high or too low

One of the most typical SLO problems is overpromising by setting SLO expectations too high or underdelivering by setting SLO aims too low. SLOs help assesses how well your team follows through on what has been agreed upon, whether it’s a customer-facing SLA or an internal business aim. When SLOs are set to be in constant violation or compliance, they lose their significance and are no longer helpful in determining the health of your application.

Take, for example, service availability. A good availability metric should be relevant (captures user experience), proportionate (change in the metric should be related to change in user-perceived availability), and actionable, according to Google G-Suite experts (insight into why the metric is low or high).

A good rule of thumb is that SLO success should be linked to customer and user satisfaction, and violations should indicate declining services. Setting an SLO of 89 percent service availability, for example, can be troublesome because an 11 percent outage can affect many users. Meanwhile, because their SLOs remain inside the threshold, DevOps teams will not receive any notifications or be concerned about customer impact.

Working with your key stakeholders to build SLOs that are both achievable and effective for user experiences can help you set meaningful thresholds. Review with the owners to determine which SLIs best represent the specific use case. By tailoring SLOs in this way, you can guarantee that you’re devoting resources to ensuring that SLOs are fulfilled, that they’re used effectively, that they’re delivering customer value, and that you’re assisting Developers in improving their QA and resolution processes.

Pitfall 5: Manual evaluation of SLOs through dashboards and spreadsheets

Creating SLO performance dashboards and spreadsheets can be quite helpful in organizing and visualizing your SLOs and SLIs. Another major SLO issue is that many firms manually compile these data using various tools, which takes time away from innovation. Simply glancing at several dashboards for eyeball analytics slows down the quality review process and increases the probability of failure.

The solution is continuous and automatic release validation. To reduce human error and scale the QA process, it is critical to automatically review test results, leverage important SLIs from your monitoring instruments, and produce quality scores that can automate the go/no-go decision at every point of the lifecycle. For development teams continually hampered by manual methods while being required to create higher quality software faster, the ability to automatically stop poor code in its tracks through an intelligent, data-driven approach is significant.

An automatic and intelligent approach to creating and monitoring SLOs

It can be challenging to avoid SLO problems and overcome the challenges of designing SLOs, especially with today’s sophisticated IT operations. Stakeholders can be better prepared to develop SLOs that ensure you’re delivering dependable, resilient software and fulfills customer requirements with proper planning and high communication amongst Biz, Dev, Ops, and Security teams.

All SLIs you’ll need to develop and calibrate effective SLOs are available through an observability platform. Using a forum is a massive help for modern IT teams short on resources but want to remain fast and adaptable. When properly implemented, SLOs may help your company save money and time by decreasing costly and time-consuming service disruptions, removing silos, and enhancing collaboration.

Enteros

About Enteros

Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.