SLO (Service Level Objective)
A Service Level Objective (SLO) is an internal target for a reliability metric, for example "99.95% of requests succeed", that a team commits to.
An SLO sits between the customer-facing SLA and the raw measurement (SLI). It is usually set tighter than the SLA so the team has a safety margin before contractual penalties apply.
SLOs make trade-offs explicit: the gap between your SLO and 100% is your error budget, which teams spend on shipping changes versus protecting stability.
Related terms
SLA (Service Level Agreement)A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contractual commitment to a level of service, most commonly a guaranteed uptime percentage, with consequences if it is missed.SLI (Service Level Indicator)A Service Level Indicator (SLI) is the actual measured value of a reliability metric: the number you compare against your SLO and SLA.Error BudgetAn error budget is the amount of unreliability you are allowed before breaching your SLO, the gap between your target and 100%.
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