Overview

In today's fast-paced digital world, maintaining system reliability is crucial for business continuity and customer satisfaction. This course introduces the core principles of Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs), equipping you with the knowledge and strategies to measure, manage, and optimize reliability in complex systems. Through a structured workshop-style approach, you’ll learn how to design and implement SLIs and SLOs that directly align with business goals. By applying industry best practices, you’ll gain the confidence to make informed decisions that balance innovation with performance stability. What makes this course unique is its blend of theoretical clarity and hands-on application. You won’t just learn the definitions—you’ll apply them to real-world scenarios involving observability, incident management, and error budgeting. This course is designed for SREs, DevOps professionals, software engineers, and business leaders looking to improve service reliability. A basic understanding of cloud systems and monitoring tools will help you get the most out of it.

Syllabus

SLIs and SLOs at the Heart of Reliability

In this section, we link reliability pillars, roles, and observability practices to mapping precise SLIs into achievable SLOs, and weigh operational and business risks arising from misaligned indicators.

Establishing an SLI and SLO Team

In this section, we build a dedicated SLI/SLO team, detail SRE, owner and stakeholder roles, and discuss adapting structures to organizational culture to strengthen reliability, availability and business alignment.

Things to Consider When Crafting Your SLIs and SLOs

In this section, we connect customer-centric SLIs and SLOs to each stage of the user journey, mapping KPIs, setting data-driven performance thresholds, and analyzing trends to prioritize reliability improvements.

Observability and Monitoring Are a Necessity

In this section, we establish core observability via metrics, logs, events, and traces, link these insights to SLIs and SLOs, and practice data-driven reliability decisions.

The Financial Impact of Not Adopting Indicators

In this section, we link SLIs, SLOs and error budgets to real monetary outcomes, quantifying downtime costs, proving SRE ROI, and framing reliability discussions in clear financial language.

Workshop Preparation: Structuring the SLI and SLO Conversation

In this section, we learn to craft service level indicators, set service level objectives, and honor service level agreements by tracing customer journeys and defining precise technical boundaries.

SLIs and SLOs for Web Applications

In this section, we map user journeys to precise SLIs, define SLOs for availability, latency, and error budgets, and prioritize indicators through personas, system boundaries, and architectural touchpoints.

SLIs and SLOs for Distributed Systems

In this section, we design SLIs and SLOs for distributed multi-tier architectures, compare cloud versus on-premises impacts, map system boundaries, and prioritize reliability metrics using persona journeys.

Optimizing SLIs and SLOs for Database Performance

In this section, we Design database-centric Service Level Indicators and Objectives by linking architecture, persona journeys and boundaries to metrics that support performance, availability, integrity and recovery goals.

Developing SLIs and SLOs for New Features

In this section, we map new feature workflows to SLIs and SLOs-cache hit ratio, redirect latency, error rate-ranked by business impact through persona-driven analysis.

SLO Monitoring and Alerting

In this section, we Configure Service Level Objective alerts, monitor via Service Level Indicators, and interpret error budgets to balance rapid incident detection with sustainable on call cadence.

Service Level Performance Metrics: Daily Operations

In this section, we build real-time SLI dashboards and conduct cross-functional iterative SLO reviews, using AI-driven anomaly detection to adjust reliability targets and maintain metrics aligned with changing business needs.

SLO Preservation and Incident Management

In this section, we explore incident management that maps Service Level Indicators, including Mean Time to Detection and Time to Acknowledge, to Service Level Objectives and sharper on call workflows.

SLIs and SLOs as a Service

In this section, we package SLIs and SLOs as a service, map a full product lifecycle, and tie reliability metrics to KPIs, OKRs, and SLAs for practical, customer-aligned engineering.