Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery » FAQ

What are SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs?

Reliable production systems require clear service goals, actionable telemetry, and disciplined operations. Teams should monitor user-impact signals, respond with clear incident processes, and use post-incident learning to improve resilience.

Practical guidance

  • Define SLIs/SLOs around user outcomes and service behavior.
  • Collect metrics, logs, and traces with clear ownership and retention policies.
  • Alert on actionable symptoms, not every low-level anomaly.
  • Run blameless postmortems and convert findings into concrete engineering tasks.

Relevant chapters from the book