In today's digitally dynamic environment, ensuring that services are always available and reliable is crucial, especially for high-traffic applications. One of our key customers, a leading app in the US food and beverage sector, faces this challenge daily. They handle between 700,000 and 800,000 transactions every day, so service reliability is critical. Here’s how they improved their operations by managing Service Level Objectives (SLOs) within a Service Operations Workspace (SOW).
Customer Overview
The customer, a major player in the food and beverage industry, boasts one of the most visited apps in the sector. Despite their success, they face significant challenges in managing service reliability due to a fragmented monitoring and management setup.
Challenges
- Fragmented Monitoring and Lack of Synchronization:
The customer uses over four application monitoring and observability tools to track their services. However, this multi-tool approach leads to a lack of synchronization, causing inconsistencies and misalignments across teams and departments. Their strategic SLOs are manually defined and managed using an Excel sheet, which is inefficient and prone to errors and miscommunication.
- Operational Resilience and Quality Control:
The absence of a centralized, automated system means the customer struggles with enforcing quality control measures and ensuring operational resilience. Identifying and mitigating potential risks is challenging, leaving their services vulnerable to disruptions. Additionally, using three separate tools for on-call management, incident workflows, and automation playbooks adds to the complexity, resulting in too many moving parts and an increased risk of oversight
The Solution: Centralized SLO Management with ServiceNow
To address these issues, the customer implemented ServiceNow's SLO management solution, replacing the manual Excel sheet and becoming the single source of truth for defining, tracking, monitoring, and visualizing SLOs within the ServiceNow.
Benefits
- Unified Visibility and Control: Eliminating discrepancies and ensuring all teams are aligned.
- Enhanced Risk Management: Better control over risk management with built-in audit logs and governance features.
- Streamlined Incident Management: Simplifying operations with integrated on-call management and incident workflows.
- Aggregated Performance Metrics: Providing a comprehensive view of error budget consumption and reliability performance.
Impact: Data-Driven Strategic Decisions
With the transition from manual Excel-based tracking to an automated SLO management system, the customer is projected to save approximately 300 hours of manual effort per month. This automation significantly reduces toil, allowing teams to focus on more strategic initiatives rather than repetitive administrative tasks. Each hour of manual toil costs $50, this shift represents a monthly saving of $25,000. Additionally, the improved efficiency and reliability contribute to better overall service quality and customer satisfaction.
They are also expected to observe a 25% reduction in incident response time and a 15% improvement in service uptime within the first 6 months of implementation. For example, aggregated performance metrics recently revealed a 10% increase in error budget consumption for a critical service. This insight prompted the team to investigate and identify a configuration issue in one of their APM tools. By addressing this issue promptly, they will not only avoid potential disruptions but also improve the service's reliability by 20%.
Ensuring Service Reliability
SRM-SLO adheres to ServiceNow's Common Service Data Model (CSDM), supporting both application and technical services. While business services are crucial, SREs focus directly on managing the operational aspects of application and technical services. This management may involve dedicated and distributed SRE teams for some services, while others rely on centralized reliability teams. Most services adopt a hybrid team structure. Regardless of the team setup, seamless operation hinges on robust service structuring and meticulous dependency management.
Enhancing SLO Management with APM Integration
Today, by using the Service Level Objective (SLO) application connected to Application Performance Management (APM) tools within ServiceNow, you can define your SLOs , track your error budgets, and visualize reliability metrics to make informed strategic decisions. In the upcoming release as can be seen from the diagram below you will not only be able to define SLOs within the SLO management application but also synchronize them back to the APM tools. This ensures that once you define the SLOs and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) within ServiceNow, the same monitors are in sync with your APM tools, eliminating the need for duplicate definitions.
Final Note
By adopting ServiceNow's SLO management solution, the customer has realized improved efficiency, increased alignment, enhanced reliability, and greater visibility. This transformation underscores the importance of centralized, automated systems in maintaining service reliability in high-traffic applications. Implementing SLOs within a Service Operations Workspace has proven to be a strategic move for the customer, showcasing the value of integrated, automated solutions in today's digital landscape.
