After years of working and coaching teams to implement SLOs, it’s becoming incredibly clear to me that the greatest challenge that engineering and product teams face is finding the right SLIs. SLOs are hard to get right, and it generally takes time and multiple iterations to tweak, tune, and adjust them so they’re providing value to inform when we need to take action to defend the reliability of our systems. Collectively all our teams want to release at a time when it’s safe to do so, have awareness when it’s necessary to roll back, or when to restore data. However there is an underlying assumption that the SLI itself is/has been providing value.
As hard as SLOs are to get right, thinking of a good SLI is also difficult. This especially complicates things for engineering teams that don’t have a product person. As a result, they often struggle to identify what are key user / customer journeys. This talk will attempt to provide attendees with additional guidance to help them think more clearly about and create better SLIs.