slo-management

name	slo-management
description	Use this skill when working with Elastic SLOs (Service Level Objectives). Activate when the user asks about SLO status, burn rates, error budgets, or needs to create and manage SLO definitions.
metadata	{"version":"0.1.0","visibility":"public"}

Elastic SLO Management

Checking SLO Status

List all SLOs and their current status:

elastic slos list

List SLO definitions for configuration review:

elastic slos list-definitions

Understanding SLO Data

Key Concepts

• SLI (Service Level Indicator): the metric being measured (e.g., error rate, latency)
• SLO target: the goal percentage (e.g., 99.9% availability)
• Error budget: the allowed amount of "bad" time/events (e.g., 0.1% of the window)
• Burn rate: how fast the error budget is being consumed

SLO Status Interpretation

Status	Meaning	Action
Healthy	Within error budget	No action needed
Degraded	Budget being consumed faster than expected	Monitor closely
Breached	Error budget exhausted	Immediate investigation required

Querying SLO Data via ES|QL

SLO data is stored in Elasticsearch indices. Query the rollup data:

elastic es query 'FROM .slo-observability.sli-v3* | STATS good = SUM(slo.numerator), total = SUM(slo.denominator) BY slo.id, slo.name | EVAL sli = good / total * 100 | SORT sli ASC | LIMIT 20'

SLO Best Practices for SREs

1. Start with user-facing SLOs -- measure what customers experience
2. Use error budgets for decision-making -- if budget is healthy, ship faster; if degraded, focus on reliability
3. Alert on burn rates, not thresholds -- burn rate alerts catch sustained degradation without noisy spikes
4. Review SLOs quarterly -- adjust targets based on real-world performance