Some of you may have noticed a new Service Levels icon in the IBM® Instana® Observability main menu. We are pleased to announce that our new Service Levels Dashboard is now in beta: 
What are Service Levels and why are they important?
Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are important tools for observability. They enable you to monitor the performance and availability of your services in a systematic and objective way.
By setting SLOs and monitoring SLIs, you define clear targets for system performance and can more quickly identify when that performance is not being met and user experience is degrading. This allows SRE efforts to be optimized by focusing on the critical user journeys that are most important to your customers and your business.
Service Levels (SLO) Dashboard
Our previous SLO solution is available only as an SLO widget in our custom dashboard. This is a bit difficult to find and makes it tedious to see all of your SLOs in a single view and manage them.
As more of our customers are moving to SLOs, we have been actively working to improve both the capability and usability of our SLO solution. The new SLO dashboard is our first step and lays the foundation for a first class Instana SLO experience.
The new capability includes:
- Dedicated dashboard for all SLOs
- Manage and view all your SLOs from a single page, including the ability to see SLO status, error budget remaining and more from a single table view.
- Improved flexibility for creating SLOs
- Create meaningful SLO targets for applications or websites that can track latency or availability performance using time-based or event-based data
- View details of your SLO including status, indicator performance and error budget across various time windows.
Check out our demo video:
View the video on the IBM Media Center
Find out more
Take a look at the public documentation for SLO (beta) Instana Service Level Objectives (Beta)
Coming soon
Here is a sneak peek at what will be coming soon to Service Levels:
Service level notifications
● What is it? Ability to trigger an alert or action based on SLO status or error budget depletion
● Why? Respond faster to SLO conditions or breaches by enabling automation (notify, mitigate, remediate).
Integrate synthetic monitoring into SLOs
● What is it? Ability to include synthetic monitoring when defining an SLO
● Why? Customers that use synthetic tests to simulate user actions will be able to include them as part of an SLO to better model and monitor performance of user journeys.
Maintenance window SLO exclusions
● What is it? The ability to choose time periods to be excluded from SLO calculations
● Why? By excluding time periods with known anomalies (eg. system maintenance, 3rd party outage) you can better see and focus on real issues under your control.
Get started
No action is needed by you to explore this new option. Just click on the Service Levels icon on the main Instana navigation to get started with the beta:
If you would like a live demo, have questions, or want to provide feedback on our new Service Levels dashboard, contact us.
Jeremy Hughes
Product Manager, Instana.