SLI/SLO/SLA Management & Alerting Design

Stop drowning in alert noise. Build SLO-based monitoring that focuses on customer impact. Free Prometheus Alert Generator tool included. Start with a free discovery call.

Your On-Call Team Is Drowning in Alert Noise

Your dashboards light up like a Christmas tree. Engineers ignore pages because most of them don’t matter. When real incidents happen, you miss them in the noise. Your SRE team is exhausted, and reliability keeps getting worse.

The problem isn’t that you have too many alerts. The problem is your alerts aren’t connected to what actually matters: customer impact.

Most teams alert on arbitrary thresholds: CPU over 80%, error rate above 5%, response time over 500ms. These numbers sound reasonable, but they don’t answer the fundamental question: “Is this affecting customers right now?”

The SLO Solution: Alert on Customer Impact, Not Arbitrary Thresholds

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) fundamentally change the approach. Instead of alerting when a metric crosses some arbitrary line, you alert when you’re burning through your error budget too fast. Your alerts map directly to customer experience and business risk.

When done right, SLO-based monitoring:

  • Cuts alert volume by 60-80% while catching real issues faster
  • Gives on-call engineers confidence that pages actually matter
  • Creates shared language between engineering and business stakeholders
  • Makes reliability measurable and improvable over time

But implementing SLOs at scale is hard. Manual rule creation is tedious and error-prone. Long-window error budget calculations cause Prometheus query timeouts. Different teams implement SLOs inconsistently. Alert tuning becomes guesswork.

That’s where I come in.

Start With a Free Discovery Call

Let’s talk about your alerting challenges, your current monitoring setup, and whether SLO-based monitoring makes sense for your organization.

Book Free Discovery Call

Free Tool: Prometheus Alert Generator

As part of my commitment to the observability community, I built and maintain a free, open-source tool that generates production-ready Prometheus SLO alerting rules in minutes.

Try the Prometheus Alert Generator →

What It Does

The tool generates complete Prometheus configurations for:

  • Liveness and availability monitoring with customizable thresholds
  • Multi-window burn rate alerting following Google SRE best practices
  • Error budget tracking over 7, 30, or 90-day windows
  • Recording rules using battle-tested Riemann Sum technique for high-scale environments

No installation. No account creation. Just a straightforward form that produces YAML you can deploy immediately.

Why It Matters

This tool solves the biggest pain points in SLO implementation:

  • Time savings: Generate rules in minutes instead of hours of PromQL crafting
  • Consistency: Same patterns across all services, no copy-paste drift
  • Performance: Handles high-cardinality metrics without query timeouts
  • Best practices: Multi-window burn rate detection cuts false positives

Read the technical deep-dive →

The Riemann Sum approach for long-window calculations was developed while helping a client monitor hundreds of microservices with millions of time series. It’s proven at Fortune 500 scale.

Try It Now

Visit prometheus-alert-generator.com and generate your first rule set. It’s completely free and open source under Apache 2.0.

Contributing: The code is on GitHub. Bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests welcome.

Beyond the Tool: Full SLO Implementation Support

The free tool gets you started quickly. But implementing SLOs across an organization requires strategy, not just tooling.

I help teams design and roll out SLO-based monitoring at scale.

What Full SLO Implementation Includes

SLI Selection and Definition

  • Identify the right Service Level Indicators for your business model
  • Define what “healthy” means from the customer’s viewpoint
  • Map technical metrics to business outcomes
  • Avoid vanity metrics that don’t drive decisions

SLO Target Setting

  • Set realistic reliability targets based on customer needs, not arbitrary “five nines”
  • Calculate meaningful error budgets that balance reliability and velocity
  • Establish clear ownership and accountability for SLOs
  • Create decision thresholds that make tradeoffs explicit

Alerting Strategy

  • Design burn rate alerts that fire when it matters, not constantly
  • Eliminate alert fatigue through multi-window detection
  • Build runbooks that connect alerts to clear next actions
  • Train on-call teams to trust the pages they receive

Error Budget Policy

  • Create error budget policies that teams actually follow
  • Define what happens when budgets are exhausted
  • Build processes that make reliability visible to stakeholders
  • Connect SLO compliance to deployment freezes or sprint planning

Organizational Rollout

  • Pilot SLOs with key services before org-wide adoption
  • Train teams to define and own their service SLOs
  • Create templates and processes that scale across the organization
  • Establish SLO review cadences that drive continuous improvement

Tooling Integration

  • Integrate SLO tracking into existing dashboards and workflows
  • Connect SLOs to incident management and postmortem processes
  • Implement error budget tracking across Prometheus, Grafana, ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, or other platforms
  • Build automation that makes SLO maintenance sustainable

The Core Method: Customer-Centric Reliability

Most SLO implementations fail because they optimize for the wrong things. They pick arbitrary percentiles, set “five nines” targets without understanding customer needs, and create SLOs that nobody actually uses for decision-making.

I use a framework built around falsifiable questions about customer experience:

  1. What user journey are we measuring? (Scope)
  2. What level of reliability do customers actually need? (Comparison)
  3. What evidence proves we’re meeting or missing that target? (Measurable outcomes)

If you can’t articulate what customer behavior would change if you hit your SLO vs. missed it, the SLO isn’t ready yet. This framework ensures your SLOs drive real decisions, not just dashboards nobody looks at.

The same rigor applies to SLIs. We identify indicators that reflect genuine customer impact, not proxy metrics that are easy to measure but don’t matter. When your SLIs map to customer experience and your SLOs define clear thresholds, reliability becomes measurable and improvable.

This Is How Teams Build Sustainable Reliability

SLO-based monitoring isn’t just about reducing alert noise. It’s about creating shared language between engineering and business, making reliability measurable, and enabling data-driven decisions about where to invest.

When SLOs work:

  • Engineering knows what “good enough” reliability looks like
  • Business stakeholders understand the cost of higher reliability targets
  • On-call teams trust their alerts and respond confidently
  • Incident retrospectives drive targeted improvements, not random firefighting
  • Reliability improves systematically over time

You’re not outsourcing reliability management to me. You’re building internal capability to define, measure, and improve reliability using SLOs. I help you establish the foundation, train your teams, and make the approach sustainable.

How It Works

  1. Free discovery call to understand your alerting challenges and current monitoring
  2. Scope the engagement based on your needs (tool implementation, full SLO rollout, alerting redesign)
  3. SLI/SLO design workshops with your engineering teams
  4. Implementation support including rule generation, dashboard creation, runbook development
  5. Training and knowledge transfer so your team owns SLO management going forward

Engagement length depends on scope. Alerting redesign for a few key services might be 3-4 weeks. Organization-wide SLO rollout might be 8-12 weeks.

Who This Is For

Ideal if you:

  • Have Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar observability platforms
  • Face alert fatigue, noisy on-call, or unreliable alerting
  • Want to implement SLO-based monitoring at team or org level
  • Need expert guidance on SLI selection, SLO targets, and error budget policy
  • Prefer building internal capability over vendor-led implementations

Who I Am

Jack Neely – Independent Observability Architect, Cardinality Cloud

  • 25 years in systems architecture and SRE
  • Led observability teams at Palo Alto Networks and Fitbit
  • Implemented Thanos at enterprise scale for Prometheus clustering (8M+ samples/sec, 150TiB logs/day, 300+ engineers)
  • Built high-scale SLO monitoring for Fortune 500 companies with millions of time series
  • Open source contributor (Graphite, Prometheus, Thanos, StatsRelay, Prometheus Alert Generator)
  • Host: Cardinality Cloud YouTube channel

I’ve implemented SLO-based monitoring at scale in some of the most demanding production environments. The techniques in the free tool and the framework I teach come from solving these problems repeatedly in the real world.

What Happens After?

Three outcomes:

  1. We scope an engagement (alerting redesign, SLO implementation, organizational rollout)
  2. Not a priority right now (fine, use the free tool and maybe we work together later)
  3. You implement yourself (great, the tool and conversation gave you what you need)

No pressure. Just clarity.

Book Your Free Discovery Call

Let’s talk about your alerting challenges and see if SLO-based monitoring makes sense for you.

Book Free Discovery Call

FAQ

Q: Can I just use the free tool without consulting services? A: Absolutely! The Prometheus Alert Generator is completely free and requires no contact with me. Use it as much as you want. The consulting services are for teams that want strategic help with SLO implementation at scale.

Q: Does this only work with Prometheus? A: The free tool generates Prometheus rules specifically. But the SLO implementation methodology works across any modern observability platform: Datadog, New Relic, Grafana Cloud, Honeycomb, etc. We design SLOs first, then implement them in whatever tooling you use.

Q: What’s the difference between the free tool and full implementation support? A: The tool generates alerting rules for services you’ve already defined SLOs for. Full implementation helps you choose the right SLIs, set appropriate SLO targets, design error budget policies, train teams, and roll out SLOs across your organization.

Q: Do I need to be an SRE expert to use the tool? A: No. The tool includes sensible defaults and explanations. If you have basic Prometheus knowledge, you can generate production-ready rules. The consulting services are for teams that want deeper expertise in SLO strategy.

Q: What if we already have some SLOs but they’re not working well? A: Common situation. Often the SLIs are poorly chosen, targets are unrealistic, or alerts are tuned wrong. We can audit your existing SLOs and redesign them to actually drive decisions and reduce noise.

Q: Can you help with SLAs (Service Level Agreements), not just SLOs? A: Yes. SLAs are contractual commitments to customers, usually based on SLOs. I help teams ensure their internal SLOs align with external SLAs, and that monitoring accurately reflects SLA compliance. This includes designing customer-facing reliability dashboards and reports.