An Introduction to Blameless SLOs

Getting Started​

Service Levels have become the common language for cross-functional teams to set guardrails and incentives to drive high levels of service reliability. Service Level Indicators (SLI) are a quantitative measure, typically provided through your APM platform. Traditionally, these refer to either latency (e.g. response time) or availability (e.g. good versus all requests) and are points on a digital user journey that contribute to customer experience and satisfaction.

Service Levels​

To track the reliability performance of those SLIs, users set Service levels, such as a Service Level Objective (SLO) target, against each SLI. A reliability target is expressed as the minimum percentage of requests (e.g. 95.90%) over a specific time window (e.g. 28-day sliding window) teams have decided that they have to meet a performance objective (SLO) on their SLI, to keep their customers or users happy. It automatically translates into a maximum amount of time over that time window, which is the wiggle room (or buffer) a team has to accelerate feature velocity or concentrate on improving reliability. This amount of time is defined as the Error Budget, or simply “budget” that teams can spend or consume before your corresponding service no longer meets its reliability objectives, within that time window.

As a new User to SLOs​

To help you, as a new user, Blameless provides you with the SLO Wizard to help guide you through the process. You start with the User Journey.

Start by launching the SLO Manager. Blameless opens to the User Journey Landing page. Next, click on “+New Journey”. The SLO Wizard will walk you through the process, and you can follow that process via the guide icon at the top of the page or by clicking the on “Next” button.

You can continue to the section “Working with the SLO Wizard” for a high level description of the feature.

For detailed instructions regarding the New User Journey and the SLO Wizard, refer to the Building a New SLO.

As an Experienced User of SLOs​

As an experienced user, you are probably familiar enough with the process to not need the SLO Wizard to create more SLIs, but it is certainly there for you to use to create new user journeys and add new SLOs to user journeys. You can continue on via the section, “Launching the SLO Manager”.

Working via the SLO Wizard​

An SLO requires the following:

• Create the User Journey
• Create the SLI
• Create the Error Budget Policy
• Create the SLO
• Set the Thresholds

Creating a New User Journey​

Creating a New User Journey occurs via the SLO Wizard to simplify the process. The SLO Wizard guides you through, showing your progress at the top of the window.

Manage your User Journeys​

1. Click on the SLO Manager icon.

The User Journey window will open, display three options in the left side of the SLO window:

• User Journey
• Error Budget Policies
• Service Level Indicators

When it opens, the default landing page is the existing User Journey list (if any).

User Journey​

The User Journey is composed of SLOs, SLIs, and Error Budgets which allow the user to examine the state of their reliability conformance.

Displaying the SLOs​

If you want to examine the contents of an existing User Journey, there are two ways to do this:

1. Click on the down arrow to the left of the User Journey name, which opens a "Quick View" of the associated SLOs.
2. Click on the User Journey name itself, which opens the User Journey window and displays a list of associated SLOs in a either Card or Table view with more details (see below the definition of key terms used in both the card and table views)
3. Click on the down arrow to the LEFT of the User Journey name. A drop-down appears, providing a Quick View of the associated SLOs names.

Key SLO Terms​

Here are some common, but key, SLO terms you will see throughout our documentation.

4. Click on an SLO row title which opens a new Details window. The new window will contain the definition of the SLO (reliability target, servel level, etc.), the associated SLI and the associated Error Budget Policy, The User Journey Summary remains visible on the far right side of the window.

You will note within the Details window you have several icons identifying actions you can apply to the elements in the window. These are identified and the action defined in the following table.

5. If there are existing SLOs: Click on the desired SLO.

6. Click on an SLO Card. It launches the SLO Details window just like above in the drop-down option.

Modifying an Existing User Journey​

1. If you wish to modify an existing User Journey:

Within the SLO, you can see the associated SLI, the attached Error Budget alert policy, as well as a User Journey Summary.

For detailed instructions regarding Existing SLOs, refer to the A Guide to Managing Blameless SLOs

Actionable SLOs​

The Blameless advantage is that our SLOs are "Actionable". Teams responsible for the reliability of one or more services can be automatically notified via email, Slack when Error Budgets are depleting below certain thresholds (e.g. 25%). Additionally, an Error Budget alert policy can automatically start a Blameless incident based on those same thresholds.

For example: Using an error budget policy as a rule to trigger one or more notifications to one or more teams via email and Slack channels.

Ingesting metrics for SLIs​

After the SLI has been created, SLO Manager immediately starts injecting time series data from one or more metrics that compose the SLI (e.g. good, valid) from the selected data source (e.g. DataDog, New Relic, Prometheus, etc.)

The SLI status is reported depending on the status. For example:

Examples regarding these status icons appears in the following:

Blameless SLO API Endpoints​

Blameless offers a set of SLO APIs to support the client’s needs.

For detailed information on our SLO API endpoints, refer to the SLO API docs and SLO Timeseries API docs.