SLOs that Delight: Mastering Multi-Service SLO Calculations

Struggling to define meaningful SLOs for complex systems? This talk gives SREs a clear framework and practical tools for calculating and composing SLOs across multiple services when you likely don’t own your entire stack. Learn to align SLOs with customer needs and improve scalability.

This talk is for DevOps and SRE engineers who are looking to optimize the number of SLOs in their system and looking for methods to manage a large number of various SLIs for their complex, multi-level service architecture. The talk covers practical methods for calculating SLOs based on multiple SLIs and dependencies including reliability of 3P service providers and unknowns. Attendants expect to be familiar with the SRE basic principles and terminology. The talk includes some probability math.

Overwhelmed by the complexity of managing SLOs across your microservices architecture? This talk provides DevOps and SRE engineers with actionable strategies for defining, calculating, and optimizing SLOs in systems with a large number of SLIs.

We’ll explore practical techniques for:

• SLO Targets: Right-guessing and improving your SLO goals.
• SLO Optimization: Right-sizing the number of SLOs to ensure effective monitoring without unnecessary overhead.
• SLO Composition: Mastering aggregation and other methods to derive meaningful SLOs from diverse SLIs.
• Dependency Management: Incorporating the reliability of third-party services and unknowns into your SLO calculations.

Attendees should be familiar with basic SRE principles. The talk will include some probability math to illustrate key concepts.