Reliability & operations · Glossary term
What is Service Level Objective (SLO)?
A target range or threshold for a service-level indicator over a stated population and measurement window.
Why does Service Level Objective (SLO) matter?
It translates an expected user outcome into an operating boundary for monitoring, capacity, release risk, and incident decisions.
Service Level Objective (SLO) in practice
Choose an indicator users care about, set the target from product needs rather than current performance, define the window and exclusions, and attach an error-budget policy.
What is the common confusion about Service Level Objective (SLO)?
An SLO is an internal reliability objective. A contractual service-level agreement can include remedies and may use different definitions.
Learn Service Level Objective (SLO) in the course
Start with
- Inference Metrics — TTFT, TPOT, ITL, Goodput, P99
Four metrics decide whether an inference deployment is working. TTFT is prefill plus queue plus network. TPOT (equivalently ITL) is the memory-bound decode cost per token.
Taught in Phase 17: Infrastructure & Production.
Related terms
- Service Level Indicator (SLI)A quantitative measure of service behavior at a defined user-relevant boundary, such as successful request ratio or latency below a…
- Error BudgetThe amount of unsuccessful service allowed by a service-level objective over its measurement window before the objective is exhausted.
- AvailabilityThe proportion of eligible service interactions or time windows in which users can obtain the defined acceptable service under a stated…
- GoodputThe rate of completed requests that satisfy defined service constraints, such as both time-to-first-token and per-token latency…
- Deadline PropagationPassing the remaining end-to-end time budget to downstream calls so each dependency knows how long the original request can still usefully…
Sources
More terms in Reliability & operations
This entry comes from glossary/terms.md on GitHub. Browse all 250 glossary terms.