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Create and edit SLIs and SLOs

BETA FEATURE

This feature is currently in beta.

You can create SLIs and SLOs manually through the New Relic UI. Alternatively, you can automate the process with our NerdGraph API and the Terraform Service Level resource.

Important

In order to create service levels you need a role with permissions to modify and delete metric rules.

Key concepts to create SLIs and SLOs

Keep in mind these concepts when defining SLIs and SLOs.

The SLI entity

In the New Relic ecosystem, SLIs and SLOs are linked to entities, which are all the elements in your stack that report data to us, or that generate data that we have access to. The entity that an SLI is related to determines where the SLI/SLO results show. And the entity's tags help filter down SLI results on the service levels view.

SLMs in New Relic One

You can define SLIs on any NRDB event that is reported to New Relic, and therefore you can also base SLIs on custom events. Most custom events are not related to a single New Relic entity, but provide higher level business and user experience insights. In this case, you can still relate the SLI to a specific entity or to a workload.

SLI queries

SLIs are defined as the percentage of good responses out of the total number of valid requests. Most often you’ll set up your SLIs by defining the valid and good pieces:

  • A valid request is any request that you want to count as meaningful for your SLIs (for example, all transactions related to an endpoint that weren’t initiated by a health check).
  • A good response is any response that you consider to provide a good output for the end-user or client service (for example, the service responded in less than 2 seconds, providing a good navigation experience for the end user).

Alternatively, you can define what you consider to be the bad responses instead:

  • A bad response is any response that you consider to provide a bad output (for example, the service responded with a server error, causing the client to fail its flow). New Relic will automatically derive the count of good responses as valid - bad.

Request-based SLOs are based on an SLI defined as the ratio of the number of good requests to the total number of requests. A request-based SLO is met when that ratio meets or exceeds the goal for the compliance period.

Suggested SLIs

In this section you’ll find some SLIs that are typically used to measure the performance of services and browser applications.

SLIs for APM services instrumented with the New Relic agent

Based on Transaction events, these SLIs are the most common for request-driven services:

SLIs for APM services instrumented with OpenTelemetry

Based on OpenTelemetry spans, these SLIs are the most common for request-driven services:

SLIs for browser applications

The following SLIs are based on Google's Browser Core Web Vitals.

Create and edit service levels

You can create SLIs and SLOs from several places on New Relic One:

  • From the Service levels view on the top menu. You can associate the SLI with any entity across your accounts.
  • From the Service levels page in any APM Service. The SLI will be associated with that specific APM service. If you use this starting point, New Relic will automatically create the most common service level indicators for this entity type, based on the latest available data.
  • From the Service levels tab in any workload. You can associate the SLI with any entity in the workload, or the workload itself.

Follow these steps:

Edit SLIs

After you’ve created an SLI, access the UI and click on the ... menu to edit it:

Edit SLIs

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