Getting SLOs in place is only the first step. We’re introducing Nobl9 SLO Oversight to help teams keep them accurate, relevant, and useful over time.

It’s wild to think that we started Nobl9 over six years ago. You learn a lot in six years. When we started this journey into the world of modern reliability engineering, we were guided by the principle that reliability work is mission-critical. Yet so often, it’s relegated to an afterthought – and measured in ridiculous ways like counting incidents. 

It’s been incredible to see the progress made. As an industry, we’re better positioned than ever to deliver efficient, reliable software that our modern world is built on. Yet there’s still so much work to be done. 

We’re fortunate to have worked with hundreds of organizations and teams (from small startups to large fortune 500s) to implement SLOs. When I distill these experiences I keep coming back to one universal truth: an SLO that isn’t acted on is no better than no SLO at all. In fact, it may be worse – providing a false sense of security. It’s unlikely that someone will maintain an SLO that has no action tied to it. It’s just human nature.

Said another way, we’ve learned that the journey doesn’t stop at defining reliability targets once. Reliability through SRE principles takes a sustained effort. It’s not enough to just create SLOs, we have to live by them. 

Why we started Nobl9

We founded Nobl9 to engage in the “noble pursuit of reliability.” We believe that for companies to achieve exceptional reliability outcomes, reliability must be both measurable and actionable. SLOs aim to solve both of these challenges. I’d be lying if I said that you could snap your fingers and have SLOs fix everything! Reliability is also a cultural challenge. While SLOs might start as a technical practice, success depends on how people and teams integrate them into their daily lives. 

What we’ve learned about SLO adoption

Early on we thought adoption would hinge on technical barriers — data sources, math, and integration. Those are certainly important, but over time we saw a different challenge emerge. While teams were great at initially creating SLOs; they struggled to sustain that momentum.

I’ve watched teams do incredible work getting initial SLOs defined, only to find six months later that no one was sure who owned them, or whether they still reflected reality. In a few companies, a single champion tried to hold it all together — until scale made that impossible.

SLOs succeed when they’re treated like living agreements, not one-time metrics. That means defining ownership, versioning changes, and having regular reviews. And most importantly, taking action based on what the SLOs are saying. Without that, SLOs quickly become a box-checking exercise and teams fall back into old habits like counting incidents and alerting on CPU cycles. 

The stakes have never been higher. When teams make SLOs part of their every day operations, the results are absolutely incredible: fewer alerts and incidents, way more focused engineering, and reduced observability and infrastructure spend.

The Gaps in Existing Solution

There’s no question that existing tooling (including ours!) has fallen short. Nobl9 certainly makes the heavy lifting easier, doing the work of just getting data to show up, wiring metrics, defining thresholds, and trying to measure what “good” means for a user who never behaves predictably. Users can trust the SLO data they see in Nobl9. Even so, beautiful dashboards can quickly fade into neglect once the novelty wears off.

It’s not enough to have great data. There has to also be a clear process for how that data should be used. We have to know which SLOs are up to date, who owns them, or what should happen when an error budget burns. Without that feedback loop SLOs quickly lose their meaning and the reliability culture that started with optimism quietly loses momentum.

We’ve seen it happen again and again. SLOs become orphaned, dashboards go stale, and people stop paying attention. For SLOs to actually guide decisions, the data has to be correct, easy to interpret, and consistent across systems. And there needs to be a simple way to keep it that way, without teams constantly cleaning it up by hand.. The software should do the heavy lifting, not the people.

In the end, it’s not about more charts or more controls. It’s about making reliability data meaningful enough to guide behavior. That belief led us to our next step at Nobl9: bringing structure and accountability to the SLO program itself.

Introducing Nobl9 SLO Oversight

That’s why today we’re announcing Nobl9 SLO Oversight. It’s built to help teams sustain their reliability programs, grow adoption, and keep SLOs useful long after the first rollout.

The foundation is simple: solve the real problems that cause SLOs to decay.

Review cycles keep SLOs alive by giving everyone a heartbeat. Instead of static definitions that drift out of relevance, each SLO gets a regular checkpoint where teams confirm ownership, revisit targets, and update data sources before surprises pile up.

SLO quality checks catch the quiet mistakes that make people stop trusting their dashboards such as poorly defined thresholds, unrealistic targets, and mismatched data inputs. They make reliability data something teams can act on with confidence, not skepticism.

These quality checks are built on SLO anomaly detection. SLO Oversight looks for the subtle warning signs that usually slip through: error budgets that have been burning for months, or gaps that hide the truth about service health. And when problems appear, Nobl9 doesn’t just raise a flag, it guides users toward the fix, showing which inputs or definitions need attention.

Nobl9 SLO Oversight also includes new filtering capabilities that make it easy to find the right SLOs. Enhanced filters make it easy to see which SLOs need review, who is responsible, and which services might have quality issues that need correcting. 

Together, these capabilities breathe life into SLO management. They keep reliability programs healthy without adding more manual work, helping teams stay aligned on what matters: trustworthy data, consistent practices, and meaningful goals.

What’s most exciting is that this is only the start. Organizations are realizing that observability and SLO management are distinct disciplines that need each other. Observability provides the plumbing; SLO management creates the culture. Nobl9 Governance brings them together.

We’ve never been more excited about the future of reliability engineering—this is the next chapter.

If you’d like to see it in action, sign up for our upcoming webinar, where we’ll walk through these new capabilities along with Nobl9’s industry-leading reporting, alerting, SLO creation, and dashboard features.