Challenge 5: Setting Priorities for Reliability

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Introduction

Now that you’re familiar with the business goals and the SLIs that measure them, and you know your app’s current performance, it’s time to set improvement goals. We’ll be setting achievable targets for your teams to achieve in the short-term objectives (a few months) and aspirational long-term objectives for the app.

Description

Note: For this exercise, make educated guesses if exact information isn’t available.

Just like SLIs, SLOs (refresher on what are SLOs) are also documented on paper before implementing them in monitoring tools. That’s what you will do here.

  1. Define Achievable SLOs for the business goals below.
    • Set realistic, achievable values that you’d like the app to reach in the next month. Use the app’s current performance as a reference point. Your application needs to walk before it can run.
  2. Define Aspirational SLOs (on paper) for the business goals below.
    • Picture Movie Guru a year from now: an efficient, user-delighting tool (but still short of perfection—since unicorns and 100% targets are rare in the real world). These SLOs should represent goals your team can work toward in the coming year.

Business goals

Business Goal 1: Ensure users can access the main page quickly and reliably.

  • Define SLO 1a: Availability SLO
  • Define SLO 1b: Latency SLO

Business Goal 2: Ensure the chatbot responds quickly and keeps users engaged.

  • Define SLO 2a: Quality SLO (based on user engagement)
  • Define SLO 2b: Latency SLO

Success Criteria

  • You’ve established Achievable SLO objectives for the short-term.
    • Each SLO has a target value and a compliance period (see examples below)
    • Example SLOs for a fictional shopping cart service:
      • Availability: 99.9% of the users are able to visit the shopping cart measured over a 24-hour rolling window.
      • Latency: 99% of users should be able to load the shopping cart within 600 milliseconds, measured over a 24-hour rolling window.
  • You’ve set Aspirational SLOs based on an ideal user experience to aim for over the next year.
  • Your objectives are backed by logical business assumptions.

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