SLO pitfalls and how
to avoid them
Pitfall 1: SLOs not tied to business goals
SLOs not tied to business goals can be an unnecessary distraction and steal time from critical tasks.
It’s important to not monitor and remediate problems just because they exist.

How to avoid• Ensure every SLO is tied to an SLA or internal business goal.
• Reconsider the importance of every SLO being tracked
if it doesn’t fall into one of the two criteria.

Pitfall 2: Using SLOs reactively vs. proactively
When SLOs are in place as a mechanism to fix something when it’s broken defeats the end goalof designing highly resilient and reliable systems which require a more proactive approach to resolving
issues before they affect end users.

How to avoid• Ensure SLOs are integrated as part of the DevOps lifecycle
and are evaluated against frequently.
• Automatically track error budgets and leverage Davis AI
to get ‘pre-crime’ alerts before a violation happens as
opposed to getting alerted after the fact.
• Take advantage of Davis AI to get root cause analysis
and automatically trigger remediation or incident
management workflows for any violations.

Pitfall 3: SLOs with no individual or team ownership
SLOs with no individual or team ownership results in ‘blame game’ and ‘finger pointing’ when SLOs areviolated. Resolution times take even longer when remediation plans do not exist or are not well defined.

How to avoid• Collaborate with Development, DevOps and SRE teams
to establish an owner for every SLO created.
• Ensure SLOs are viable, relevant SLIs are monitored,
thresholds are set, dashboards are setup, remediation
processes are agreed upon, and alerting mechanisms
are tested and in place.

Pitfall 4: Setting incorrect SLO thresholds
Setting SLO thresholds too high that they can never be achieved or too low makes them meaninglessas they discourage teams from improving quality and levels of service.

How to avoid• Review SLI history, industry standards and bestpractices for common SLOs before setting targets.
• Talk to the relevant stakeholder/owner of the SLO
to understand thresholds and whether they makesense for the specific use case.

Pitfall 5: Manually evaluating SLOs
Looking at dashboards rather than automatic evaluation wastes precious time that can be spent on innovation.

How to avoid• Automatically evaluate SLOs through quality gatesas code moves through the delivery pipeline to enforce
continuous release validation and stop bad code
in its tracks.
• This prevents SLO violations from occurring in thefirst place and reduces the need for manual oversightand review.

About Dynatrace
Dynatrace provides software intelligence to simplify cloud complexity and accelerate digital transformation. With automatic and intelligent observability at scale, ourall-in-one platform delivers precise answers about the performance and security of applications, the underlying infrastructure, and the experience of all users to enableorganizations to innovate faster, collaborate more efficiently, and deliver more value with dramatically less effort. That’s why many of the world’s largest enterprises trust
Dynatrace® to modernize and automate cloud operations, release better software faster, and deliver unrivalled digital experiences.

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12.07.21 15039_FS_USlet_cs