Set the SLO Before the Dashboard
Define an SLI and SLO that represent user experience rather than internal activity.
A dashboard is not an SLO. Dashboards show many signals; an SLO names the service promise you will manage. Start with a user journey, choose the event that proves it worked, decide the quality threshold, and set the measurement window. Diagnostics can explain why the promise is failing, but the SLO says whether users are getting what they came for. Common trap: teams promote whatever metric is easiest to collect. That produces alert noise and weak prioritization. A user-centered SLO forces tradeoffs: if the SLO is healthy, reliability work may wait behind product work; if it is burning fast, feature…
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