Create SLO form

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
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    Summary of Create SLO Form

    This document provides essential information on the fields available for adding a Service Level Objective (SLO) in ServiceNow's Service Reliability Management. Understanding these fields is crucial for effectively managing and measuring service performance.

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    Key Features

    • Name: The title of the SLO.
    • SLI Type: Options include Availability, Errors, Latency, and Saturation.
    • Measurement Methods: You can measure the objective by Duration or Count.

    Measuring by Duration

    • Objective (%): Define the desired service availability percentage, e.g., Five Nines (99.999%) indicates minimal downtime.
    • Compliance Period: Choose from Month, Rolling 7 days, Rolling 30 days, or Rolling 90 days for metrics calculation.
    • Error Budget: Automatically calculated based on the desired availability. It defines the maximum allowed errors over a period.

    Measuring by Count

    • SLO Type: Options include Count by periods or Count by occurrences.
    • Limit Occurrences: Set the number of occurrences leading to a breach, acting as an error budget.
    • Compliance Period: Similar options as measuring by duration.

    Note that the Assignment group is auto-populated, simplifying the setup process.

    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.