Create SLOs, SLIs, and error budget policies

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 2 minutes to read

    • Define service level objectives (SLOs), service level indicators (SLIs), and error budget policies to monitor service health. These tools help you and your teams track performance and respond when needed.

    Before you begin

    To send notifications when an error budget policy is breached, your team must have a notification destination configured. You can check by navigating to Teams > [Your team] > SLO Notification destinations in Service Operations Workspace. For more information, see Create a notification destination in SRM.

    Note:
    By default, the outage data source for SLIs includes unplanned and degradation outages. Administrators can include planned outages by adding planned to the sn_sow_slo.outage_supported_types system property value.

    Role required: srm_admin, srm_manager, or srm_responder

    About this task

    Create SLOs, SLIs, and error budget policies to monitor service health and help make sure that your services support business goals.

    In Service Reliability Management (SRM), an SLO must have at least one SLI. SLIs can be filtered to a service or configuration item (CI) within the parent service hierarchy. Filtering an SLI to a CI can help you more accurately track service health and identify root causes faster.

    Each SLI can be associated with only one SLO, helping prevent conflicting performance expectations.

    Note:
    SLOs can also be generated automatically using the SLO creator agent. For details, see SLO creator agent.

    Procedure

    1. Navigate to Workspaces > Service Operations Workspace > Services (Services icon).
    2. On the Services page, select the service you want to monitor, then select the Reliability metrics tab and select Add SLO & SLI.
    3. In the Service Level Objective (SLO) form, fill in the fields for your SLO and select Next.
      For information about the SLO fields, see Create SLO form.
    4. In the Service Level Indicators (SLI) form, select the data source for your SLI.
      Data sourceDescription
      Alerts Base the SLI on alerts from integrated monitoring tools.

      Use alerts when you want your SLI to include early warning signs and a broader view of reliability.
      Outages Base the SLI on outages detected by monitoring tools and reported by users.

      Use outages when you want to measure actual downtime and customer impact.
      Note:
      If you create multiple SLIs for an SLO, they must use the same data source.
    5. In the same form, select Add indicators for <data source>, fill in the fields for your SLI, and then select Next.
      For more information about the SLI fields, see Create SLI form.
    6. Optional: In the Error budget policies form, select Add policy, and fill in the fields for your error budget policy.
      For more information, see Add an error budget policy form.
      Note:
      If you don't add an error budget policy, the SLO objective percentage is only informational. Adding a policy helps you take corrective actions based on the performance data. If you're not ready to add a policy, you can add one later.
    7. Review your SLO, SLI, and error budget policy, and then select Activate.

      Your SLO, SLI, and error budget policy are now active. The SLO record opens, displaying its reliability state and error budget information.

    What to do next

    See the following to learn how to monitor and manage your SLOs: