Service Level Objective (SLO)
A target for reliability or speed (for example, 99% of tickets triaged in under 5 minutes) that automation must meet.
A Service Level Objective (SLO) sets a measurable target for reliability or speed, like 99% of runs finishing under a time limit. It defines acceptable performance for a workflow.
Teams use SLOs to align technical work with user impact, allocate error budgets, and decide when to ship or fix. They make expectations explicit for operators and stakeholders.
In automation, SLOs guide alerting, capacity planning, and backlog management. Clear SLOs reduce noise and focus effort where it protects experience.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do SLOs differ from SLAs?
SLOs are internal targets; SLAs are external commitments with potential penalties. SLOs inform SLAs but are not contracts.
What metrics suit SLOs?
Latency percentiles, success rates, freshness, and coverage—metrics that reflect user experience, not just system internals.
What is an error budget?
The allowed amount of unreliability within the SLO (e.g., 1% failures). Burn rates guide how aggressively to release or pause changes.
How do I pick targets?
Use historical performance, customer expectations, and downstream limits. Start achievable and tighten as reliability improves.
How often should SLOs be reviewed?
Quarterly or after major shifts in traffic or architecture. Adjust if consistently missed or easily exceeded.
How do SLOs affect incident response?
Breaches trigger alerts and higher priority for fixes. High burn may pause risky deploys until stability returns.
Should SLOs vary by workflow?
Yes—critical, user-facing flows get tighter SLOs than batch or internal tasks.
How do I communicate SLOs?
Dashboards, on-call runbooks, and stakeholder updates. Make targets and current status visible.
Do SLOs slow delivery?
They prioritize stability when budgets burn, reducing rework and incidents. Over time they speed delivery.
Agentic AI
An AI approach where models autonomously plan next steps, choose tools, and iterate toward an objective within guardrails.
Agentic Workflow
A sequence where an AI agent plans, executes tool calls, evaluates results, and loops until success criteria are met.
Agent Handoff
A pattern where one AI agent passes context and state to another specialized agent to keep multi-step automation modular.
Ship glossary-backed automations
Bring your terms into GrowthAX delivery—map them to owners, SLAs, and instrumentation so your automations launch with shared language.
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