Create SLO form

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Create SLO form

    This form enables ServiceNow customers to create Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Error Budget policies. These components help teams monitor service health and take timely actions to maintain service reliability and performance.

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    Key Features

    • Name: Define a clear, descriptive name for the SLO.
    • SLI Type: Choose the metric type to measure service performance:
      • Availability - percentage of uptime (default)
      • Errors - frequency of service errors
      • Latency - time to service a request
      • Saturation - resource constraint measurement
    • Measurement Method: Select how to measure the objective:
      • Duration: Total time the service meets the objective without breach (only option for duration).
      • Count: Number of occurrences or periods within a compliance period.
    • Objective (%): Specify the target service level percentage, such as "Five Nines" (99.999%), which corresponds to very minimal downtime.
    • Compliance Period: Choose the time window for metric calculation:
      • Month (calendar month)
      • Rolling 7 days
      • Rolling 30 days
      • Rolling 90 days
    • Error Budget: Automatically calculated based on the objective percentage, representing the maximum allowed downtime or errors within the compliance period. For example, with 99.99% availability, the error budget equates to about 52.56 minutes per year.
    • Limit Occurrences (for Count Measurement): Set the maximum allowable number of occurrences before a breach is declared, functioning as an error budget.
    • Assignment Group: This field is auto-populated to assign responsibility.

    Practical Application

    By configuring SLOs with appropriate SLIs and error budgets, ServiceNow customers can:

    • Precisely track service availability, error rates, latency, or saturation based on business priorities.
    • Understand acceptable limits of downtime or errors through error budgets, enabling proactive incident management.
    • Use compliance periods that best fit their operational cadence for accurate monitoring and reporting.
    • Automatically calculate error budgets in intuitive units (days, hours, minutes, seconds) for duration-based objectives.

    This structured approach facilitates maintaining service reliability and meeting agreed-upon service commitments efficiently.

    Create an SLO, an SLI, and Error budget policies to help you and your team track your service health and take necessary actions when required.

    Service level objective form

    Set up your service level objectives. For more information, see Create SLO, SLI, and Error budget policies.

    Table 1. Service Level Objective form
    Field Description
    Name Name of the SLO.
    SLI type
    Type of the SLI based on which the metrics are calculated. The available types of SLI are as follows:
    • Availability: Percentage of time your service is available. (Default)
    • Errors: Measurement of how frequently service error occurs.
    • Latency: Time taken to service a request. The actual amount of time that elapsed.
    • Saturation: Measurement of your system fraction, emphasizing the resources that are most constrained.
    How do you want to measure this objective? You can measure this objective by:
    • Duration: The amount of time the service spends without breaching. It's the only value available.
    • Count: The number of periods or occurrences in a given compliance period.
    Table 2. Measuring by Duration
    Field Description
    Objective (%) The percentage of how available (uptime) you want the service to be over a length of time. If measuring by duration, an objective percentage of Five Nines (99.999%) means that the service wasn’t available for 26 seconds per month, or about 5 minutes and 35 seconds per year. This is used to calculate your error budget.
    Compliance period Period for which the metrics are calculated. The available options are:
    • Month: The duration is considered to be the current month. For example, if the current date is 26th January, the duration will be considered from 1st January until 31st January.
    • Rolling 7 days: The duration is considered to be 7 days from the current date.
    • Rolling 30 days: The duration is considered to be 30 days from the current date. For example, if the current date is 26th January, the duration will be considered from 25th December.
    • Rolling 90 days: The duration is considered to be 90 days from the current date. For example, if the current date is 26th January, the duration will be considered from 25th October.
    Error budget Auto-populated.

    The maximum level of errors (downtime) allowed over a certain period. A percentage of total service availability. Once you set your objective (%), your error budget is automatically calculated using this formula: 1 – (Desired) Availability.

    The error budget of a service will be calculated in days, hours, minutes, and seconds for a desired availability of 99.99% (Four Nines) of the year by:
    1. Calculating the total time in seconds in a year: 31536000 seconds.
    2. Determining the error budget as 1 – (Desired) Availability: 1 - 0.9999 = 0.0001.
    3. Converting the error budget to time units.
    For example, if the error budget is 0.0001:
    • Error Budget in Seconds = 0.0001 * 31,536,000 seconds = 3,153.6 seconds.
    • Error Budget in Minutes = 3,153.6 seconds / 60 = 52.56 minutes.
    • Error Budget in Hours = 52.56/60 = 0.875 hours.
    • Error Budget in Days = 52.56 minutes / (24 * 60) ≈ 0.0364 days.
    Note:
    Your error budget appears in units of days, hours, minutes, and seconds only when you measure your SLO by duration.
    Table 3. Measuring by Count

    SLO type

    Count by periods or Count by occurrences
    Limit occurrences The number of occurrences after which a breach occurs.

    Limit occurrences act as an error budget.
    Compliance period Period for which the metrics are calculated. The available options are:
    • Month: The duration is considered to be the current month. For example, if the current date is 26th January, the duration will be considered from 1st January until 31st January.
    • Rolling 7 days: The duration is considered to be 7 days from the current date.
    • Rolling 30 days: The duration is considered to be 30 days from the current date. For example, if the current date is 26th January, the duration will be considered from 25th December.
    • Rolling 90 days: The duration is considered to be 90 days from the current date. For example, if the current date is 26th January, the duration will be considered from 25th October.
    Note:
    The Assignment group is auto-populated.