SLO vs SLA: What’s the Difference and How Does SLI Relate?

You’ve probably heard of service-level agreements (SLAs) and service-level objectives (SLOs) as their use within businesses that provide or consume services is prevalent. A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract between a service provider and a customer that specifies measurable metrics for the level of service that the customer can expect to receive. Service-level objectives specify the quality of service for a given business process or system. An SLO can help define business goals and objectives by setting a target quality of service for a given process or system. They treat SLOs, services and their owners as first-class citizens and support embedding these critical metrics out of the box.