When to use SLO and when normal alerts in kibana?

[Navya1 (Navya)]

Hello All,
I have a questions on SLO when compared to normal alert setup in kibana. What is the difference ? Which option has to choose ? When to choose SLO and when to use normal alerts ?

Please advise.

Thanks,
Navya.

[carly.richmond]

Hi @Navya1,

Welcome to the community! SLOs, or Service Level Objectives, are targets for your applications. Commonly they are set at an organisation level. You may also have a burn rate, where you are alerted when you are burning through the budget for a given SLO faster than expected. Alerts are simply a notification that a given metric or value is outside of a defined range.

In terms of when to use an SLO versus just an alert, it depends on the targets of your organisation and the events that you need to react to. I'd recommend having a look at the Elastic SLO documentation as well as the SRE handbook sections on SLOs and alerting on SLOs.

Hope that helps!