Chronosphere SLOs: Simplifying service reliability in Kubernetes environments

Today, we’re excited to showcase Chronosphere SLOs, a new capability that transforms how engineering teams create, manage, and use Service Level Objectives (SLOs). This feature empowers you to implement Google’s reliability framework without the complexity that has historically made SLO adoption challenging, especially in containerized environments.

If you’re running critical services on Kubernetes, you know that customer experience directly impacts business results. One poor service interaction can drive customers away permanently. But understanding when your service quality is truly meeting customer expectations remains frustratingly difficult.

The industry has focused on SLOs as the answer. First introduced by Google in their SRE Book, SLOs have become the essential standardized approach for monitoring customer experience and system health, and for making data-driven decisions about where to invest engineering time.

Despite their proven value, implementing SLOs remains challenging for many teams. After speaking with hundreds of organizations, we discovered three consistent barriers to adoption:

“We tried setting up SLOs, but figuring out the right metrics and writing complex queries just wasn’t worth the effort.”

This sentiment echoes across engineering teams. Defining meaningful SLOs that align with customer expectations requires that these teams have a deep understanding of both your services and the tools used to monitor them, and the observability platforms in use. This specialized knowledge often limits effective SLO implementation to a small subset of organizations.

“We set up SLOs for our core services, but keeping them updated as our applications and telemetry evolved became a full-time job.”

In microservices and DevOps environments where things are often changing, maintaining SLOs across evolving services adds significant operational overhead. New endpoints, changing architectures, and shifting customer patterns all require continuous updates to SLO configurations. Without automation, coverage gaps emerge.

“When we get a SLO alert, we waste a lot of time figuring out what’s actually causing the error budget to burn.”

Compared to traditional threshold-based alerts that most development teams understand intuitively, SLO burn rate alerts can appear opaque. This disconnect contributes to slower incident resolution and diminishes the value of SLO-based monitoring.

We built Chronosphere SLOs to address these exact pain points. Our goal was simple: make SLOs accessible to engineer on every team in the organization, regardless of their expertise level or environment complexity.

Here’s how we’ve done it:

SLO adoption snowballs once a team has created their first effective SLO. PromQL is super powerful, but it is by far the biggest barrier and point of friction for teams to simply get started with SLOs. Instead of requiring deep query expertise, our queryless setup experience makes it easy for any service owner to define and manage SLOs.

The setup process also incorporates best practices from Google’s SRE framework automatically, ensuring that you get:

• High-signal, low-noise multi-window multi-burn-rate alerts
• Uniform SLO definitions
• And consistent implementation across teams

All of this happens without needing to become an expert first.

Mike Pouncey, the Director of Software Engineering at Astronomer, put it well:

“The SLO creation process is easy and fast, especially when the underlying data is readily available. Specifying queries for existing success indicators like failure rates and alert statuses has been powerful.”

We drew on our own experience as a software engineering organization running a large-scale, Kubernetes- and microservices-based SaaS product to solve a key challenge with SLOs.

As a tenanted SaaS provider (dedicated resources per customer) who drinks their own Champagne (we use Chronosphere to monitor Chronosphere), we are onboarding new customers all the time. We want each customer to have their own independently tracked error budgets, and the last thing we wanted to do was to update our SLO configuration every time we spin up a new customer. To solve this, we built dynamic SLI discovery.

As your services evolve and new endpoints are added, they’re automatically included in your SLO monitoring—no configuration changes required. This dramatically reduces the maintenance overhead that typically plagues SLO implementations, especially in containerized environments where services are constantly changing.

Through experimentation and testing we took a fresh look at the ergonomics of responding to SLO burn rate alerts. When you receive a burn rate alert, you’ll immediately see contextually relevant service issues causing your budget to burn.

Instead of starting your investigation from scratch, you can drill directly into the service details with that context pre-defined. This approach cuts through the confusion that typically surrounds SLO alerting, enabling faster incident resolution.

Setting realistic SLO targets has always been more art than science. Chronosphere SLOs lets you use historical data for your target SLIs to determine the most realistic value for your objectives.

This removes the guesswork from SLO definition, ensuring that you start with targets that make sense for your services and customer expectations.

Unlike many observability platforms that struggle with open source telemetry, Chronosphere SLOs are designed to work seamlessly in microservices architectures using Prometheus and OpenTelemetry formats.

This flexibility ensures that your SLO strategy works across your entire environment, not just for services using vendor-specific instrumentation.

While the technical capabilities are impressive, what matters most is how this translates into business value. Here’s what our customers are already experiencing:

Customer-centric measurement

By focusing on symptoms rather than causes, Chronosphere SLOs ensure better coverage of customer-impacting issues while reducing false positives. SLOs can be wielded incorrectly and if your SLIs aren’t targeting the things your customers care about you’ll miss out on this benefit.

This approach aligns monitoring directly with customer experience, ensuring that your team’s attention is directed toward issues that actually matter to users. When you’re alerted, it’s because something is impacting your customers, not because an arbitrary threshold was crossed.

Standardized operational practices

One of the most powerful benefits of widespread SLO adoption is the normalization of alerting, dashboarding, and operational reviews across your organization.

This standardization facilitates easier team transitions and on-call rotations. A developer picking up a service they’re unfamiliar with can immediately understand its health through consistent SLO frameworks rather than having to decipher service-specific monitoring approaches.

Data-driven decision making

The fastest and easiest way to lose customers is poor reliability. Chronosphere SLOs provides an objective framework for balancing reliability investments with new feature development.
Instead of endless debates about whether to fix technical debt or build new capabilities, teams can use their error budget consumption as a clear signal. If you have budget remaining, you can focus on innovation. If you’re burning your budget too quickly, it’s time to invest in reliability.

This data-driven approach enables more consistent risk management across the organization and helps align engineering priorities with actual customer impact.

Intelligent SLO setup and maintenance

With Chronosphere SLOs — our latest advancements incorporate Google SRE Handbook best practices — we are enabling robust SLO level validation with historical data, and empowering users with SLOs-as-Code capabilities for seamless GitOps management. This comprehensive approach:

• Ensures reliability
• Enhances efficiency
• And aligns with industry-leading standards, which streamlines operations and empowers development teams

SLOs at massive scale

Unlock scalability through managing tens of thousands of SLOs and expand your observability without limitations. Our platform is engineered to handle the demands of even the most complex environments, ensuring you maintain granular visibility and control over your system’s performance — no matter the scale.

We’ve designed the onboarding process to be as straightforward as possible. The Chronosphere SLO creation process uses SLO Builder Mode which provides a queryless, guided workflow that leverages historical data validation to ensure realistic objectives.

SLO Creation Steps:

• Click “Add” to initiate SLO creation process
• Name the SLO (“Portal Availability”) and optionally add description/runbook
• Confirm alerting is enabled before proceeding to main configuration
• Select service type (RPC) which auto-populates SLI preview showing error vs total requests
• Choose specific endpoint (critical payment API) for monitoring
• Configure error criteria (HTTP 5xx errors for availability focus)
• Set initial objective target (99.5% availability over 4-week period)
• Run historical analysis using last 2 days of data to validate the SLO target levels
• Adjust target based on simulation (99.2% proved more realistic than 99.5%)
• Accept default alerting thresholds for error budget burn warnings
• Submit configuration to activate SLO tracking and alerting

For teams that prefer automation, we’ve also included full GitOps capability with out-of-the-box support for a complete API, Terraform, and Chrono CLI.

In addition, teams have the ability to write their own PromQL queries for the SLO creation if desired.

The Chronosphere SLOs capability is available for all customers. To see how it can transform your approach to service reliability:

• Current customers can contact their Customer Success representative to enable SLOs for their account.
• New to Chronosphere? Request a demo at chronosphere.io to see how our approach to SLOs can benefit your organization.

We’re excited to see how you use these new capabilities to deliver more reliable services and better customer experiences. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback as you implement Chronosphere SLOs in your environment.

Read our solution brief to learn more about Chronosphere SLOs.