After years of working and coaching teams to implement SLOs, it’s becoming incredibly clear to me that the greatest challenge that engineering and product teams face is finding the right SLIs. SLOs are hard to get right, and it generally takes time and multiple iterations to tweak, tune, and adjust them so they’re providing value to inform when we need to take action to defend the reliability of our systems. However there is an underlying assumption that the SLI itself is/has been providing value. As hard as SLOs are to get right, thinking of a good SLI is also difficult. This especially complicates things for engineering teams that don’t have a product person. As a result, they often struggle to identify what are key user / customer journeys. This talk will attempt to provide attendees with additional guidance to help them think more clearly about and create better SLIs. We’ll break SLIs up into three (3) categories – Customer / User Experience, Supporting Services, and Management/Reputation. For each of these categories, I’ll discuss three relevant SLIs of each (e.g., application metrics, network metrics, Public Sentiment, etc.), some best practices, common pitfalls, and how the signal for each of the nine (9) metrics can be developed further to become more mature over time. Sal Furino is a Customer Reliability Engineer at Bloomberg. During his career he’s worked as a TPM, SRE, Developer, Sys Admin, and IT support. While not working he enjoys cooking, gaming, and traveling. Sal lives in Queens and has a BS in Applied Mathematics from Marist College.

Imagine you’re observing a worker swinging a hammer. As they swing the hammer, they make small adjustments to better hit and drive the nail or rivet into the surface. These adjustments are made unconsciously. The hammer has become an extension of their arm. It’s important to consider that the arm doesn’t just change the hammer; it gives it new meaning beyond that of simply some wood and steel. But the hammer also changes the arm! Weeks, months, years of swinging that hammer changes the worker themselves. The tools we use change us and enable us to think and interact with the world differently. This talk will briefly explore how to view internal tooling through the lens of product management in not just developing and shipping features, but how those features empower teams to change their understanding of their social-technical systems.