Monitor your SLO

After creating an SLO, you can monitor its performance using the SLO detail view. The dashboard shows your current SLI value, error budget remaining, and burndown trends. Understanding the error budget burndown chart helps you identify when reliability is degrading before you exhaust your budget.

To monitor your SLO, complete the following steps:

1. In Grafana Cloud, navigate to Alerts & IRM > SLO.

2. Click on your SLO name to open the detail view.

3. Review the Error Budget Burndown chart to see how your error budget is being consumed over time.

4. Check the SLI panel to see your current reliability percentage.

5. Review the Error budget remaining indicator to understand how much error budget you have left.

6. Use the time range selector to zoom in on specific periods of interest.

How to read the burndown chart

The Error Budget Burndown chart shows remaining error budget over time.

• A downward slope means the budget is being consumed (incidents or unreliability).
• A steeper slope means consumption is faster.
• In ideal conditions the line stays near the top. If it approaches zero, you’re at risk of exhausting the budget before the window resets.

Use this to spot degrading reliability early and decide when to prioritize fixes over new features.

• What to do when budget is low:
• Consider pausing feature work and focusing on reliability: fix incidents, reduce error rates, or improve the SLI.
• Add SLO alert rules to get notified when budget consumption crosses a threshold.

You can view your SLO’s current status, error budget consumption, and historical performance.

In your final milestone, you’ll review what you’ve accomplished in this journey.