SLO, alerting and incident — alert design and incident process in 7–14 days
SLO alerting incident is a concrete SRE playbook: we define SLI/SLO and an error budget, tidy up alerts (severity, thresholds, dedup), set up on-call, escalations and post-mortems. All on a unified stack (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Alertmanager/Grafana) with MTTR KPIs and a ready-to-use runbook.
SLO alerting incident — why and when
Risk-based priorities
We link SLOs to user experience (chosen SLIs). The error budget lets you consciously “spend” reliability on change.
Less noise, more context
Context-rich alerts (labels, runbook, “what changed?”) and deduplication reduce TTA/MTTA and MTTR.
Evidence, KPIs and retros
Post-mortems, RCA and incident KPIs support audits and improve SLA predictability.
SLI vs SLO vs SLA — basics
SLI — indicator
A precise metric of experience (e.g., “p95 latency < 300 ms” or “availability”).
SLO — objective
The level to be met (e.g., 99.9%). Drives release and risk decisions.
SLA — agreement
An external promise with consequences. SLOs support SLAs, not the other way round.
Separate product SLOs from internal ones and keep them as code (Git) alongside alert thresholds.
SLO alerting incident — alerting design
Thresholds & windows
- ✓Alerts close to SLO (error-budget burn), not “every spike”.
- ✓Time windows and aggregations aligned to the SLI.
Noise reduction
- ✓Deduplication, silencing, dependency correlation.
- ✓Runbook and “what changed?” in the payload.
Escalations & on-call
- ✓Escalation graph (L1→L2→L3) and quiet hours.
- ✓Rotations and response SLOs (TTA/MTTA).
Incident management — on-call, RCA and post-mortems
Runbooks & roles
Incident Commander, Communications Lead, Scribe. Agreed channels, message templates and clear exit criteria.
RCA & improvement
Blameless: 5 Whys, timeline, corrective actions with owners and due dates. Metrics: MTTR, recurrence, incident cost.
Observability stack: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager
OTel instrumentation (SDK/Collector) + metrics/logs/traces, PromQL rules and Alertmanager alerts with PagerDuty/Opsgenie integration.
Further reading: Google SRE — Service Level Objectives, Prometheus — Alerting rules, OpenTelemetry — documentation, PagerDuty — Incident Response.
Starter package (2 weeks)
- ✓SLI/SLO map + initial targets and error budgets.
- ✓Alert rules, thresholds, burn-rate, deduplication.
- ✓On-call runbook + post-mortem template.
- ✓Discovery (2–3h), metrics and logs review.
- ✓SLO workshop and Alertmanager config.
- ✓Demo + recommendations list and a 90-day plan.
- ✓Less noise, faster responses (lower MTTR).
- ✓Clear release decisions via error budget.
- ✓Standardized incident actions.
FAQ — SLO, alerting and incident management
Should an SLO be “tighter” than an SLA?
How do we cut alert noise?
What should we measure in incidents?
OpenTelemetry or vendor agent?
How fast can we start with SLO alerting incident?
Do you support PagerDuty/Opsgenie integrations?
Want to structure SLOs, alerting and incident management?
Free 20-minute consultation — we’ll show the fastest path to lower MTTR and less alert noise.