Why SLIs and SLOs Are Essential for Observability

Alec Isaacson discusses the challenges faced by IT operations teams in meeting business expectations due to a disconnect in how success is measured, advocating for a focus on service-level indicators (SLIs) and service-level objectives (SLOs) to bridge this gap. He explains that while IT traditionally measures resource consumption, businesses prioritize speed and quality, leading to tension and ineffective monitoring strategies. Isaacson suggests using SLIs that directly reflect service performance, such as latency and error rates, to align IT efforts with business needs and improve observability practices. He outlines the process of setting SLOs based on SLIs, emphasizing the importance of presenting them as percentages to handle statistical outliers and ensure clarity for non-technical stakeholders. This approach promises a more responsive IT service, better business alignment, and accelerated improvement, with further guidance available in the Google SRE book and through New Relic resources.