Maintaining near 100% uptime for online services has increased the importance of service-level objectives (SLOs) to evaluate and measure software performance, but several pitfalls can hinder their effectiveness. These include misalignment with business goals, lack of ownership and accountability, reactive instead of proactive usage, inappropriate thresholds, and manual evaluation methods. Ensuring SLOs are aligned with critical business objectives, establishing ownership, integrating them into the CI/CD pipeline, setting realistic thresholds, and automating their evaluation are essential strategies for avoiding these pitfalls. Tools like Dynatrace can aid in automating the SLO process, providing observability, and enabling continuous release validation, thus helping businesses reduce service outages, improve software reliability, and enhance collaboration among teams.