ENGLISH
REFERENCE

SLO

n.
C1 Advanced Monitoring
Definition

n. Stands for Service Level Objective. A specific goal for how well a service should work, like being available 99.9% of the time.

n. Abbreviation for Service Level Objective. A target value or range of values for a service level that is measured by a service level indicator (SLI).


SIMPLE

Our team set an SLO of 99.9% uptime for the website.

CONTEXTUAL

The engineering team monitors the SLO daily to ensure the application remains reliable for all global users.

COMPLEX

Defining a realistic SLO requires balancing the user's need for high availability against the engineering cost of maintaining such a rigorous standard.

Origin

An initialism of service level objective, formed by analogy with the earlier service level agreement (SLA).

Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Usage

Commonly used in software engineering and site reliability engineering (SRE) contexts.

Pitfall

The SLO of the server is 100%.The SLO of the server is 99.9%.In technical contexts, an SLO is rarely set to 100% because it leaves no room for necessary maintenance or unexpected failures.

Last updated July 22, 2026