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Dev MaxxingAdvancedReliability and Observability75 sec
Service-level indicator
A service-level indicator is a specific, measured metric used to judge how well a service is performing, such as the percentage of requests served successfully.
Prerequisite: Metric
What matters
Choosing the right indicator matters because it becomes the actual number a team is judged and alerted against, so it needs to reflect what users genuinely experience.
Example
'Percentage of requests completed in under 500ms' is a service-level indicator a team might track to judge their API's responsiveness.
Common misconception
A service-level indicator is not the same as a service-level objective; the indicator is the measured metric itself, while the objective is the target value set for it.
Recall question
What is the difference between a service-level indicator and a service-level objective?
Keywords and related concepts
SLIservice-level indicatorreliability metricservice-level objective