Documentation Plugins SLO SLI Examples

SLI examples for Grafana SLO

A Service Level Indicator (SLI) is a metric that measures how well your service is performing from the user’s perspective. SLIs typically track availability, latency, or success rate. For example:

• Requests respond within 2 seconds
• Requests do not return system errors

To define a Service Level Objective (SLO), pair an SLI with a target and a time window. For example:

An SLO sets your reliability goal by targeting SLI performance over a time window. Grafana SLO continuously evaluates whether the SLI meets that target.

SLI calculation types

SLIs are defined using data source queries that measure the success of the indicator. For example:

• What is the ratio of successful requests under 2 seconds (latency)?
• What is the ratio of successful requests without system errors (success rate)?

SLIs typically use one of two calculation types:

1. Event-based SLIs (also called ratio-based or request-based SLIs)

   Calculate the ratio of successful events to total events:

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   number of successful events / total number of events

2. Time-based SLIs

   Mark each time slice (such as one minute) as good or bad, and calculate the ratio of good slices to total slices:

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   number of successful time-slices / total number of time-slices

   A drawback of time-based SLIs is that a bad minute during low traffic penalizes the SLO as much as a bad minute during peak traffic, even though it impacts more users.

The following examples define event-based SLIs for different types of metrics:

• SLI example for availability
• SLI example for latency
• Multidimensional SLI example