SLO

Definitions

1. Service Level Objective — a target value or range for a service's reliability, expressed as a percentage (e.g., 99.9% availability). SLOs provide a quantitative definition of 'reliable enough' and form the basis for error budget calculations. They're the internal target, distinct from SLAs (external contracts) and SLIs (the actual measurements).

   In plain English: A reliability goal that a team sets for their service, like 'our website should work 99.9% of the time' — it defines how much downtime is acceptable.

   Example: Our SLO is 99.95% availability, and we've burned 60% of this month's error budget already — time to freeze deployments and focus on stability.

Related Terms

• SLA
• Nines
• SLI
• error budget
• Five Nines
• MTTR
• MTTF
• MTBF
• Incident Management