Elastic SLO Management

Checking SLO Status

List all SLOs and their current status:

elastic slos list

List SLO definitions for configuration review:

elastic slos list-definitions

Understanding SLO Data

Key Concepts

• SLI (Service Level Indicator): the metric being measured (e.g., error rate, latency)
• SLO target: the goal percentage (e.g., 99.9% availability)
• Error budget: the allowed amount of "bad" time/events (e.g., 0.1% of the window)
• Burn rate: how fast the error budget is being consumed

SLO Status Interpretation

Querying SLO Data via ES|QL

SLO data is stored in Elasticsearch indices. Query the rollup data:

elastic es query 'FROM .slo-observability.sli-v3* | STATS good = SUM(slo.numerator), total = SUM(slo.denominator) BY slo.id, slo.name | EVAL sli = good / total * 100 | SORT sli ASC | LIMIT 20'

SLO Best Practices for SREs

1. Start with user-facing SLOs -- measure what customers experience
2. Use error budgets for decision-making -- if budget is healthy, ship faster; if degraded, focus on reliability
3. Alert on burn rates, not thresholds -- burn rate alerts catch sustained degradation without noisy spikes
4. Review SLOs quarterly -- adjust targets based on real-world performance