Nobl9 Best Practices Tips and Tricks

Nobl9 is a tool to help you create Service Level Objectives (SLOs), monitor them, and notify you when things are going wrong.

SLOs allows you to define the reliability of your products and services in terms of customer expectations. You can create SLOs for user journeys, internal services, or even infrastructure.

This article will walk through some best practices and show some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of using Nobl9.

If you haven’t already, check out Creating your first SLO and Creating your first Alert Policy.

Organization

Best_Practices_icon_-04

Projects

Projects enable logical groupings within Nobl9. A Project contains all your resources including your Services, SLOs, Datasources and Alert Methods. Projects are also how granular access to resources is managed for Nobl9’s Role-based Authentication Controls (RBAC).
Best_Practices_icon_-05

Services

Services contain SLOs. A service can map to a real-world service, an application in your company, or just a logical grouping for a bunch of SLOs.
Services live under projects and are shown in the Service

Access and Security

Best_Practices_icon_-06

Add friends

You can add other users in your organization through the Settings → User page.
Best_Practices_icon_-07

Access for Senior Management

Within an organization, you may want to grant senior management or someone at the C-Level access to all your SLOs.
Best_Practices_asset_-08

Access Keys

To use sloctl, you will need an access key. Access keys are available under Settings → Access Keys. We do not show the secret after you dismiss the initial access key UI

Navigation

Best_Practices_icon_-09

What’s my org name?

When using sloctl or navigating through some Nobl9 scenarios, you may occasionally need your Organization Name.
Best_Practices_icon_-10

Sharing SLO

If you have an SLO you want to share with someone at your company, you can copy the URL when on an SLO details page.
Best_Practices_icon_-11

Viewing SLOs across projects

Labels can be added to services and SLOs. Using labels, you can filter from the grid view to see only the SLOs and services
Best_Practices_asset_-12

Colorblind?

The Service Health Dashboard leverages red, yellow, and green to differentiate states. If you’re color blind, check

Other Tips

Best_Practices_asset_-05

Free Metrics with AWS?

If you’re using AWS, chances are you already have a metrics source. All AWS Services publish metrics to AWS Cloudwatch. Nobl9 supports Cloudwatch as a Datasource which allows you to easily and quickly generate SLOs on your infrastructure.
Use Cloudwatch with N9
Best_Practices_icon_-07

Bulk Updates

Everything you can do in the UI, you can do via sloctl. If you have bulk changes or want to add in several SLOs, you can create your SLOs in YAML and use sloctl to push those into Nobl9.
The YAML guide
Best_Practices_icon_-08

Verifying an Alert Method

After creating an Alert Method, you can test the alert method by going back to the details of the Alert Method and clicking “Test”.
Best_Practices_asset_-13

Use Severity in alerts

When creating an Alert, you can specify the severity of the alert. The severity can be passed to the alert method but also, different severities could mean different alerting protocols.
Best_Practices_asset_-15

Drag to zoom

When looking at the charts in the SLO details view, you can click and drag in the chart to zoom in on a specific time window. This will update the time picker and all the other charts in that view.
Best_Practices_asset_-17

Time slices percent of a percent

When adding an SLO using time slices, the Target is the reliability percentage you want to aim for, and the Time Slice Allowance is a percentage of the Target.
Let us show you exactly how Nobl9
can level up your reliability and user experience