SLO from Methodology to Practice: Part 3 – Best Practices for Managing SLOs with Guance¶
In the previous part we discussed SLO tool selection. Now let’s look at the best practices for SLOs in Guance.
Collaboration and communication are essential for successful service level objectives. Development and operations teams need to evaluate the impact of their work against established service reliability goals to improve the end-user experience. Guance enables everyone in your organization to track, manage, and monitor the status of all SLOs and error budgets in one place, simplifying cross-team collaboration. Teams can visualize their SLOs alongside related services and infrastructure components on dashboards, and share the real-time status of these SLOs with any stakeholders who depend on them.
Choose the Best SLO for Each Use Case¶
In Guance, you can create multiple monitors and use one or more of them to calculate an SLI. An SLI is defined as the proportion of time your service exhibits good behavior (tracked by underlying monitors that are in a non-alerting state).
Guance monitors:
- Threshold Detection
- Log Detection
- Anomaly Detection
- Range Detection
- Water Level Detection
- Security Check
- APM Metrics Detection
- RUM Metrics Detection
- Process Anomaly Detection
- Synthetic Monitoring Data Detection
You can create different types of monitors to meet the needs of each SLO.
You can create an SLO based on a RUM Metrics Detection monitor, which uses your metrics in Guance to calculate its SLI. The SLI is defined as the number of good requests out of the total number of valid requests.
If you want to track the latency of requests to a payment endpoint, it may be more appropriate to create an SLO based on an APM Metrics Detection monitor that tracks time-based data: the percentage of time the endpoint exhibits good behavior (i.e., responds fast enough to meet your SLO target). To create this SLO, you can select a Guance Threshold Monitor that triggers when the latency of requests to the payment endpoint exceeds a specific threshold.
This SLO can be expressed verbally as: “99% of the time, the request should be processed faster than 0.5 seconds over a 30-day time window.” Guance uses a status bar to visualize the historical and current status of monitor-based SLOs, making it easy to see how often the SLO has been breached. The error budget next to the status bar tells you how much time the monitor can spend in an alerting state before the SLO turns red.
On the other hand, if you want to track whether your payment endpoint successfully processes requests, you can define an SLO based on an APM Metrics Detection monitor. APM Metrics Detection primarily uses APM trace metrics to track how often requests reach the endpoint and whether they succeed. This SLO uses count-based data (i.e., the number of good events compared to the total number of valid events) as its SLI. One way to approach this is to count the number of HTTP responses with non-2xx status codes (which we treat as the number of bad events).
If your application is deployed on Docker and you want the application environment to provide good service, you can create an SLO for a secure container. You can also create a Docker monitor from a template and specify that monitor when setting up the SLO.
Enhance Your Dashboards with SLOs¶
You may already be using dashboards to visualize key performance metrics from your infrastructure and applications. You can enhance these dashboards by adding an SLO Summary widget to track the status of your SLOs over time. For more context on the SLO status, we also recommend adding SLI charts corresponding to metric-based SLOs and displaying the status of the monitors that constitute monitor-based SLOs.
Ensure Service Reliability with Guance SLOs¶
In this post, we explored several useful tips that will help you get the most value out of service level objectives in Guance. Along with your infrastructure metrics, distributed traces, logs, synthetic tests, and network data, SLOs help you ensure the best possible end-user experience. Guance’s built-in collaboration features make it easy not only to define SLOs, but also to share insights with stakeholders inside and outside your organization.
Check out our documentation to start defining and managing your SLOs. If you are not yet using Guance, you can start a free trial immediately.