Why SLOs are essential for observability

In the legacy monitoring world, resource consumption metrics were sufficient to measure availability and performance, but they don't cut it in DevOps and observability where workloads are highly variable, thresholds can be hard to set, and flexibility over measurement is needed. A new approach focuses on measuring speed and quality, using service-level indicators (SLIs) and service-level objectives (SLOs), which provide a single, easy-to-understand metric that shows Ops and Engineering teams where to focus attention and enables non-technical stakeholders to make critical business decisions. By setting an SLI and SLO for key metrics such as response time and error rates, organizations can close the disconnect between IT and the business, achieve strong business alignment, clear indicators of trouble, simplicity, and ultimately, measurable success.