Transforming On-Call Behavior: Defining SLIs and SLOs to Reduce Incidents
Learn how to implement actionable SLIs and SLOs that drive down incident volume and improve on-call effectiveness.
Transform your on-call strategy by defining SLIs and SLOs that actually reduce incidents.Back to all posts
## The $50K Hallucination Your AI model just hallucinated in production, costing $50K in customer refunds. This scenario isn't just a nightmare—it's an all-too-common reality in modern engineering. When systems fail, the fallout is measured not just in dollars but in trust, reputation, and operational efficiency. As a,
senior engineering leader, it's crucial to understand that these failures often stem from a lack of actionable metrics that predict incidents before they occur. It's time to leverage Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to pivot your on-call strategy from reactive to proactive.
## Why This Matters Engineering leaders must recognize that the stakes of operational failure are high. Poorly defined metrics lead to increased incident volume, burnout among on-call engineers, and a negative impact on customer experience. By focusing on leading indicators rather than vanity metrics, teams can move to
a state of operational maturity that emphasizes reliability. Implementing SLIs and SLOs effectively can transform how your team interacts with telemetry and incident response, leading to faster recovery times and reduced downtime. With the right metrics in place, you can create a culture of accountability and foresight
that drives both performance and satisfaction across your organization. ## How to Implement It ### Step 1: Identify Leading Indicators Start by identifying the leading indicators that correlate with incidents in your services. This could include metrics like error rates, latency, and user engagement levels. Use tools
like Prometheus or Grafana to monitor these metrics in real-time. ### Step 2: Define SLIs and SLOs Once you've identified your leading indicators, define your SLIs—quantifiable measures of service reliability. For example, an SLI could be the percentage of successful requests over a given time period. Then, set SLOs—
the target values for your SLIs. An SLO might state that 99.9% of requests should be successful over a rolling 30-day window. ### Step 3: Automate Telemetry Collection Integrate automated telemetry collection into your CI/CD pipeline. Use tools like OpenTelemetry to ensure that your systems are consistently gathering
Key takeaways
- Focus on leading indicators to predict incidents.
- Implement actionable SLIs and SLOs to transform on-call dynamics.
- Tie telemetry directly to operational actions like triage and rollouts.
Implementation checklist
- Identify leading indicators for your services.
- Establish clear SLIs and SLOs tied to business outcomes.
- Automate telemetry collection and alerting.
- Integrate SLOs into incident management workflows.
Questions we hear from teams
- What are SLIs and SLOs?
- SLIs (Service Level Indicators) are metrics that measure the reliability of a service, while SLOs (Service Level Objectives) are the target values for those SLIs.
- How do I identify leading indicators?
- Leading indicators can be identified by analyzing historical incident data and determining which metrics correlate with failures.
- Why should I automate telemetry collection?
- Automating telemetry collection ensures that you have real-time data to inform your SLIs and SLOs, leading to better decision-making.
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