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How to Define and Track SLOs

5 min read Observability

A Service Level Objective turns reliability into a target you can manage instead of a vague goal. Nova tracks the objective, spends an error budget against it, and warns you when you are burning that budget too fast to make it to the end of the window.

Steps

1

Open SLO management

Go to the SLO page. This is where you define objectives and watch their error budgets.

2

Create an SLO

Pick the service and the indicator (SLI): availability (good requests over total) or latency (requests under a threshold).

3

Set the target and window

Choose a target and a rolling window, for example 99.9% over 30 days. Nova computes the error budget from the target.

4

Watch the error budget

The budget is how much unreliability you can afford this window. Nova shows what is left and how fast you are spending it.

5

Add burn-rate alerts

Configure fast-burn and slow-burn alerts so you are paged when the budget is at risk, not after it is already gone.

Tip:

Connect the Error Budget Gate to AI autonomy so risky automated actions pause when the budget runs low. Reliability targets then drive how aggressive automation is allowed to be.

Ready to try it?

Define your first SLO and start managing reliability by the numbers.

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