How to get started with error budgets to meet SLOs for improved service reliability

26-Mar-2025 08:38 PM by Ramkumar Ramaswamy

As modern IT systems grow in complexity, IT operations teams have to work harder to ensure reliability. "What gets measured gets managed" is a management mantra that emphasizes the role of metrics in management. To ensure everything works well, operations teams need service-level objectives (SLOs). This industry term measures how an application meets the agreed-upon quality and reliability standards, serving as a bellwether of good software.

SLOs provide the internal radar for everyone to align with to ensure smooth IT operations. To set SLOs, teams must define and maintain specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound targets in terms of the availability, latency, throughput, security, and more—the key performance indicators. Typically, SLOs have the following ingredients:

A clear description of how each service level is measured
Metrics like availability, downtime, response time, and errors
Target or acceptable values such as 99.95% uptime
A timeframe for which the SLOs will remain valid and which is subject to revision

Error budgets in IT

SLOs also mark the maximum error amount or period a system is allowed to experience within a timeframe to be judged as acceptable. Akin to a financial budget, an error budget expresses the things gone wrong (errors) as a percentage of the total time or requests that transpire in a timeframe: for example, 1% of monthly requests, 0.05% of daily payments, or 0.01% of cloud storage uploads.

Error budgets bring pragmatism to address the grim truth that 100% perfect software does not and cannot possibly exist given the uncertainties of IT served over the internet. Rather than aiming for a utopian 100% uptime, error budgets acknowledge that some failure is inevitable and therefore must be tolerated. They define how much failure is tolerable for an application's performance to remain acceptable.

This realism allows teams to balance their development journey with operational uncertainties to do what it takes to ensure reliability. When an error budget is breached in uncontrollable circumstances like an outage, teams can stop complaining about the lack of funds and use their time to focus on stabilizing their systems to make them better after the network resumes.

Bridging the gaps

Robust IT observability is essential to operationalizing SLOs and error budgets. Observability goes beyond traditional monitoring by providing deep visibility into system performance through metrics, logs, and traces. It answers not just “Is the system down?” but “Why is it down, and how can we prevent it next time?”

Monitoring lays the foundation by collecting real-time data on SLO-defined metrics like latency, error rates, and uptime. For instance, a monitoring tool might track API response times against an SLO of 99% of requests completed within 200ms over 30 days. When deviations occur, alerts trigger immediate action.

However, as systems scale, manual monitoring becomes impractical. This is where artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) in IT observability helps. AIOps uses machine learning capabilities to sift through large datasets, detect anomalies, and predict potential SLO breaches. For instance, when a sudden spike in error rates threatens to exhaust the error budget, AIOps correlates it with a recent deployment or infrastructure change, enabling proactive resolution. By bridging gaps between current performance and SLOs, AIOps helps you achieve your SLOs without stressing your IT folks.

Site24x7: Empowering proactive IT reliability

Site24x7 is an AI-powered full-stack observability platform that offers comprehensive monitoring capabilities to help you optimize the performance of applications, servers, networks, and cloud services. This overarching, all-encompassing coverage serves as a single platform for you to focus and align your operations to meet your SLOs.

Site24x7’s AIOps features are here to help your operations teams meet SLOs. Its anomaly detection engine uses AI to identify outliers, such as intermittent network latency or database bottlenecks, that could surpass error budgets. This allows for course correction ahead of the curve. Automated root cause analysis helps you zero in on the underlying factors behind the errors, minimizing downtime and preserving SLO compliance. For instance, if a web application’s response time goes beyond its SLO threshold, Site24x7 notifies teams through integrated alerting (via email, Slack, etc.) and suggests remediation actions based on historical patterns.

Additionally, you can leverage Site24x7’s detailed reports and trend analysis to chart your error budgets and track your progress as you go. The platform helps you stay aware of how you are progressing by answering questions like "Are you burning through your error budgets too quickly?" For example, when your errors exceed half of the permissible monthly limit within the first week, it's time for a discussion on how to act by adjusting your priorities accordingly. This proactive stance is better than passive firefighting.

5 tips to get started

Here are five ways you can go about setting meaningful SLOs, calculating error budgets, and using IT observability:

Define meaningful SLOs: Collaborate with stakeholders to set SLOs based on user expectations and business needs. For a payment gateway, this might mean 99.9% of transactions succeed within one second.
Calculate error budgets and break them down to grasp them completely: Translate SLOs into error budgets. For example, a 99.9% uptime SLO over 30 days allows for only 43 minutes of downtime, which is your error budget, giving you the context within short, actionable timeframes.
Instrument observability: Use tools like Site24x7 to monitor key metrics and establish baselines.
Leverage AIOps: Use AI to proactively find and eliminate anomalies in your resource consumption patterns, especially from a troubleshooting perspective. Event correlation and forecasting help you prevent issues ranging from application crashes to mild latency that could snowball. Since these situations affect your SLOs, it is essential to eliminate them using IT automation. Even performing a simple server restart or provisioning in time could save your application or website from crashing during critical junctures.
Review and iterate: Regularly assess SLO compliance and adjust targets or budgets as systems evolve.

Try Site24x7

By focusing on setting sharp SLOs and using IT observability to meet them, organizations can improve service quality, use the metrics to optimize the available resources to reduce downtime and errors in every stage, and ensure customer satisfaction for sustained success. Take Site24x7’s AI-powered full-stack observability platform for a spin today and discover the platform’s ability to aid you in every stage of your error budgeting and assist your IT operations teams in meeting their SLOs every time.

Comments (0)

Note : You are not currently logged in. You can still post if you wish, but you will neither be able to receive any email updates nor will we be able to contact you to help you out.