Create SLO form

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Create SLO form

    The Create SLO form in Service Reliability Management enables ServiceNow customers to define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) that measure and manage service performance. This form provides configurable fields to specify how service reliability is tracked, supporting different types of service indicators and measurement methods.

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    Key Features

    • SLO Name: Assign a clear name to the Service Level Objective for identification.
    • SLI Type: Choose from four types of service indicators:
      • Availability: Percentage of time the service is operational.
      • Errors: Frequency of service errors.
      • Latency: Time taken to serve requests.
      • Saturation: Resource usage fullness of the system.
    • Measurement Method: Currently, duration is the primary method for measuring SLO compliance. Duration measures the amount of time the service remains within the objective without breach. Count-based measurement (by periods or occurrences) is also supported for error frequency tracking.
    • Objective Percentage: Define the target percentage for service availability or error limits. For example, an availability objective of 99.999% (Five Nines) translates to less than 26 seconds of downtime per month.
    • Compliance Period: Select the time window over which metrics are evaluated. Options include:
      • Current calendar month
      • Rolling 7, 30, or 90 days from the current date
    • Error Budget: Automatically calculated based on the objective percentage using the formula 1 – Desired Availability. This quantifies allowable downtime or errors in units of days, hours, minutes, and seconds when using duration measurement.
    • Count-Based SLOs: For count measurement, specify the limit of occurrences that trigger a breach, which acts as an error budget, along with the compliance period.
    • Assignment Group: This field is automatically populated to facilitate responsibility assignment.

    Key Outcomes

    By using the Create SLO form, ServiceNow customers can precisely define service reliability targets tailored to their operational needs. The form supports detailed measurement configurations, enabling accurate tracking of service availability, errors, latency, and saturation. Automatic error budget calculations provide clear thresholds for acceptable service performance, which are critical for managing reliability and driving continuous improvement.

    Learn about the available fields for adding a service level objective (SLO) to Service Reliability Management.

    Service level objective form

    The following table describes the available options in the Service level objective form. For step-by-step instructions, see Create SLOs, SLIs, and error budget policies.

    Table 1. Fields in the Service Level Objective form
    Field Description
    Name Name of the SLO.
    SLI type
    • Availability: Percentage of time the service is available.
    • Errors: Frequency of service errors.
    • Latency: Time taken to service a request.
    • Saturation: Fullness of the system, focusing on resource use.
    How do you want to measure this objective? You can measure this objective by:
    • Duration: The amount of time the service spends without breaching. It's the only value available.
    • Count: The number of periods or occurrences in a given compliance period.
    Table 2. Measuring by Duration
    Field Description
    Objective (%) The percentage of how available (uptime) you want the service to be over a length of time. If measuring by duration, an objective percentage of Five Nines (99.999%) means that the service wasn’t available for 26 seconds per month, or about 5 minutes and 35 seconds per year. This is used to calculate your error budget.
    Compliance period Period for which the metrics are calculated. The available options are:
    • Month: The duration is considered to be the current month. For example, if the current date is 26th January, the duration will be considered from 1st January until 31st January.
    • Rolling 7 days: The duration is considered to be 7 days from the current date.
    • Rolling 30 days: The duration is considered to be 30 days from the current date. For example, if the current date is 26th January, the duration will be considered from 25th December.
    • Rolling 90 days: The duration is considered to be 90 days from the current date. For example, if the current date is 26th January, the duration will be considered from 25th October.
    Error budget Auto-populated.

    The maximum level of errors (downtime) allowed over a certain period. A percentage of total service availability. Once you set your objective (%), your error budget is automatically calculated using this formula: 1 – (Desired) Availability.

    The error budget of a service will be calculated in days, hours, minutes, and seconds for a desired availability of 99.99% (Four Nines) of the year by:
    1. Calculating the total time in seconds in a year: 31536000 seconds.
    2. Determining the error budget as 1 – (Desired) Availability: 1 - 0.9999 = 0.0001.
    3. Converting the error budget to time units.
    For example, if the error budget is 0.0001:
    • Error Budget in Seconds = 0.0001 * 31,536,000 seconds = 3,153.6 seconds.
    • Error Budget in Minutes = 3,153.6 seconds / 60 = 52.56 minutes.
    • Error Budget in Hours = 52.56/60 = 0.875 hours.
    • Error Budget in Days = 52.56 minutes / (24 * 60) ≈ 0.0364 days.
    Note:
    Your error budget appears in units of days, hours, minutes, and seconds only when you measure your SLO by duration.
    Table 3. Measuring by Count

    SLO type

    Count by periods or Count by occurrences
    Limit occurrences The number of occurrences after which a breach occurs.

    Limit occurrences act as an error budget.
    Compliance period Period for which the metrics are calculated. The available options are:
    • Month: The duration is considered to be the current month. For example, if the current date is 26th January, the duration will be considered from 1st January until 31st January.
    • Rolling 7 days: The duration is considered to be 7 days from the current date.
    • Rolling 30 days: The duration is considered to be 30 days from the current date. For example, if the current date is 26th January, the duration will be considered from 25th December.
    • Rolling 90 days: The duration is considered to be 90 days from the current date. For example, if the current date is 26th January, the duration will be considered from 25th October.
    Note:
    The Assignment group is auto-populated.