jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #57 on 15 Jan 2021 and has tags Technical Leadership: Other
SLO — From Nothing to… Production - Ioannis Georgoulas
We’ve talked about Service Level Indicators/Objectives/Agreements (SLI/SLO/SLA) in the past as ways to focus operations effort in ways that are visible to users. Service Level here often means “availability” under some specific measure (the indicator) but it could just as easily be a wait time (jobs in the queue, emails awaiting responses, waiting list for training), disk space, or almost anything else (time until a new user successfully runs a nontrivial job?). The indicators are the measures you define; the objectives are internal targets for what those indicators should show; and agreements are external-facing agreements with your users what those numbers should be.
Other links in the roundups have focussed on the basics; Georgoulas’ article focusses on developing and advocating for SLOs in your organization, with a number of useful resources linked including some slides you could use was a starting point. This could be used by a manager or an individual contributor to advocate for adoption of internal SLOs in a team.
