Creating an SLO and associate it with a synthetic test on the console

SLO is useful to monitor the reliability of services and optimize decision-making. By using IBM Cloud Pak console, You can create an SLO easily, and associate the SLO with a synthetic test. Thus more synthetic metrics can be viewed, such as Availability, Response time, and Test instance breakdown analysis, in addition to the SLO result.

Procedure

1. Go to Administer > Monitoring, and click SLOs Configure on IBM Cloud Pak console to access the SLOs page.

2. Click Create SLO to open the Create SLO page.

3. In the Details section, enter a meaningful SLO name in the SLO Name field. Add a description of the SLO to the Description field.

4. In the Target section, do the following actions.

   1. Select the service for which the SLO is set from Application, Subscriptions, and Service lists.

      Note: An SLO can be defined on either an application or a service that belongs to an application with certain subscription.

      • If an SLO is defined on an application, you can leave the Subscriptions, and Service lists unselected.
      • If an SLO is defined on a service, you need to select the subscription and service to indicate which service that the SLO is defined against. It's because an application might have multiple subscriptions and multiple services.

   2. Set the SLO sliding time window in the Measurement window fields. You can set the time in hours or in days.

      Note: For IBM Cloud Pak® for Multicloud Management 2.0.0, the sliding time window can be set as much as 7 days or 192 hours.

   3. Set the SLO target in the SLO target (%) field. If you set SLO target to 99%, it means that you expect at least 99% of requests satisfy the success criteria in the SLI section during the sliding time window.

5. In the SLI section, do the following actions.

   1. Select Synthetic in the SLI type field. It means Synthetic is the SLI measurement source type.

   2. Set the Success criteria to define the standard of a good request.

      For example, if you set latency < 200 ms as the success criteria, a request is thought as good when its response time is less than 200 milliseconds. Also, there is an implied standard that a good request must be served without errors.

   3. Select Latency as the Measurement, and select an operator and latency time as you need.

      Note: For IBM Cloud Pak® for Multicloud Management 2.0.0, there is only one SLI measurement source type (Synthetic) and one SLI measurement (Latency). More types and measurements can be added in later versions.

   4. Select a synthetic test from the Associate with an existing test list. You can see only those synthetic tests that are related to the selected application and the current SLO and are not related to other SLOs in the Associate with an existing test list.

      You can also click Create new test to create a new synthetic test. For more information about creating synthetic tests, see Synthetics PoP.

   5. Click Finish to create the SLO.

What to do next

After an SLO is created, you can monitor the SLO and associated synthetic test results. Go to Manage applications > Hybrid applications on IBM Cloud Pak console, and do the following actions in the Applications page:

• Click an application name. In the Overview tab, click View Service level objectives and indicators. You can see the SLO definitions and results for the application. For more information, see Managing applications.

• Click an application name. In the Overview tab, click View Synthetic results, you are redirected to the Synthetic results tab, where you can see the synthetic test for the application. The synthetic test that is associated with an SLO is displayed with an SLO tag. For more information, see Viewing Synthetic test results.