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Get started with New Relic's service level management

BETA FEATURE

This feature is currently in beta.

With New Relic you can define and consume service level indicators and service level objectives for your applications.

What are SLIs and SLOs?

Service levels are used to measure the performance of a service from the end user (or client application) point of view. For instance, a Service Level can represent whether a video loaded quickly enough, or whether a directions service returned at least one possible route between two points.

Service level indicators (SLIs) are accurate quantitative measures of the user experience as described by a service level. They represent a proportion of successful outputs, and therefore they’re expressed as a percentage (%). For example, an SLI can measure the proportion of requests that were faster than some threshold, or the proportion of records coming into a pipeline that resulted in the correct value coming out.

And while users understand that a video might take a few additional seconds to load, or that an application might return an error from time to time, this shouldn’t happen often if you don’t want to lose their trust. Therefore, once you’ve defined SLIs for the performance aspects that are most relevant for the end users of your services, you need to set SLOs to track that the service is meeting their expectations. Service level objectives (SLOs) are defined as a target value that an SLI must meet over a period of time. For example, videos must start playing in less than 2 seconds 99% of the time over a week period.

Example of an SLO

See the Service level management use case implementation guide to learn more about identifying service boundaries and deploying the instrumentation that your service levels will be based on.

Service levels and APM SLA reports

New Relic has provided automatic SLA Reports for APM Services for a long time. The Apdex-based reports, which you can get on your email inbox on Mondays, are automatically generated for services that produce web transactions, and are useful to see trends over time.

On top of the SLAs, our new SLM level capability is better aligned with modern service level best practices, such as those promoted by the Google SRE Handbook, and provides new, improved functionality:

  • SLIs can be defined on any NRDB event that is reported to New Relic, not just APM transactions. Therefore you can also base SLIs on your own custom events.
  • You can decide which service boundaries and which metrics are relevant for your service levels, and you can set your own objectives.
  • You can view SLO results across your accounts, and within your workloads.

What's next?

Ready to get started? If you don't already have one, sign up for a free New Relic account. You can find service levels in several places in New Relic One:

  • At the top nav bar, under the More menu (which you can customize).
  • At the previews of those entities that have an SLI defined.
  • In APM services, at the reports section.
  • Within a workload, at the service levels tab.

Carry on and read our docs on how to create and consume SLIs and SLOs. You can also check out how to manage SLMs with our API.

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