Create an availability SLO

Grafana SLO provides a wizard-based interface for creating SLOs. The wizard guides you through defining your SLI first by selecting a time window, data source, and query type. For availability SLOs using a ratio query, you specify success and total metrics.

To create an availability SLO, complete the following steps:

1. On the left navigation menu, click Alerts & IRM.

2. Click SLO.

3. Click New SLO.

4. In the Time window field, enter 28d for a 28-day rolling window.

   A 28-day rolling window is commonly used for availability SLOs. It smooths out short spikes and aligns with how error budgets are often consumed.

5. From the Data source dropdown, select the data source that contains your metrics.

6. For Query type, select Ratio query.

   The Ratio query option appears when you select a Prometheus-compatible data source.

7. In the Success metric field, enter a Prometheus counter metric for successful events.

   For example, you might enter http_requests_total{status!~"5.."} to count successful responses (non-5xx status codes).

8. In the Total metric field, enter a Prometheus counter metric for all events (e.g., http_requests_total).

9. Click Run queries to display a preview of your SLI ratio based on the metrics you configured.

Don’t have a metric like http_requests_total? Your application or exporter may use different metric names or labels. See SLI examples for other patterns (e.g. log-based or custom metrics), or use Explore to find counters that represent success and total in your data source.

Click Set target and error budget to save your progress and move to the next step.

In the next milestone, you’ll set a target, name your SLO, and save it.

More to explore (optional)

At this point in your journey, you can explore the following paths:

• SLO creation documentation
• SLO best practices