Create SLO form

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Create SLO form

    The Create Service Level Objective (SLO) form in Service Reliability Management allows you to define and configure service level objectives to monitor and maintain the reliability of your services. This form provides fields to specify how service performance is measured and the criteria for compliance over defined periods.

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    Key Features

    • Name: Assign a unique name to the SLO for easy identification.
    • SLI Type: Choose the type of Service Level Indicator (SLI) that defines the metric for the SLO. Options include:
      • Availability (default) – percentage of service uptime
      • Errors – frequency of service errors
      • Latency – time taken to service a request
      • Saturation – measurement of constrained system resources
    • Measurement Method: Decide how the objective is measured:
      • Duration: Amount of time the service meets the objective without breach (only available method).
      • Count: Number of periods or occurrences within the compliance period (for certain SLO types).
    • Objective (%): Define the target percentage for availability or other relevant metrics (e.g., 99.999%). This percentage is used to calculate the error budget.
    • Compliance Period: Select the timeframe over which the SLO metrics are evaluated:
      • Month (calendar month)
      • Rolling 7 days
      • Rolling 30 days
      • Rolling 90 days
    • Error Budget: Automatically calculated based on the objective percentage. It represents the maximum allowable downtime or errors in the compliance period. Displayed in days, hours, minutes, and seconds when measuring by duration.
    • Limit Occurrences (for count-based measurement): Define the maximum number of occurrences allowed before a breach, acting as an error budget.
    • Assignment Group: Auto-populated to help manage responsibility for the SLO.

    Practical Application for ServiceNow Customers

    By using the Create SLO form, you can precisely define the reliability targets for your services and align monitoring with your business requirements. Setting clear objectives and compliance periods enables proactive management of service health. The automatic calculation of error budgets helps quantify allowable downtime or errors, facilitating informed decisions about incident response and service improvements. The form’s flexibility in SLI types and measurement approaches supports diverse service metrics, allowing tailored SLOs that match your operational goals.

    Learn about the available fields for adding a service level objective (SLO) to Service Reliability Management.

    Service level objective form

    The following table describes the available options in the Service level objective form. For step-by-step instructions, see Create SLOs, SLIs, and error budget policies.

    Table 1. Fields in the 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.