Creating SLOs

This page describes how to create a service level objective (SLO) in the Google Cloud console. For information on creating a SLO programmatically, see Working with the SLO API

For an overview and information on designing SLOs, see the following:

To create an SLO:

  1. Go to the Health tab for a service:

    1. In the Google Cloud console, go to Cloud Service Mesh.

      Go to Cloud Service Mesh

    2. Select the Google Cloud project from the drop-down list on the menu bar.

    3. Click the service that you want to create an SLO for.

    4. In the left navigation bar, click Health.

  2. Click the Create an SLO link.

  3. Click Set your service-level indicator (SLI) to select the type of service level indicator (SLI) to track for this SLO. Choose one of the following:

    • Availability: The ratio of the number of successful responses to the number of all responses. Requests that fail before they reach the Envoy sidecar proxy for your service (because of networking or DNS failures, for example) aren't included in this ratio.
    • Latency: The ratio of the number of calls that are below the specified Latency Threshold to the number of all calls.

  4. For latency SLIs, enter the Latency Threshold in milliseconds.

  5. In the Performance Goal section, enter a percentage in the Goal field to set the performance target for the SLI. Cloud Service Mesh uses this value to calculate the error budget you have for this SLO.

  6. In the Compliance Period section, select the Period Type and the Period Length. See Compliance periods for more information on these settings.

  7. Alternatively, in the Set your SLI section, you may select Windows-based SLI. A windowed SLI can help you catch periods of time when the service won't meet the SLO Compliance target (such as when there are spikes in the number of requests that increase latency for a short period of time). When you select this option, you must specify:

    • Goodness criterion: Set a threshold for the percentage of "good performance" that must be met in order for a given window to count as "good."
    • Duration: Set the length of each window, over which SLO performance will be measured in increments during the compliance period.

    For example, suppose you have an Availability SLO with a Rolling 7 day period, and an SLO Goal of 99%. Then you add a Goodness criterion of 95% and a Duration of 5 minutes. To be compliant, the service needs 95% of all 5 minute windows over the last 7 days to be available at least 99% of the time.

  8. Optionally, click Name your SLO to change the default SLO display name. Cloud Service Mesh supplies a default name that describes the SLO based on the settings.

  9. Click Submit.

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