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SLO Platform Evaluation Checklist
An interactive scoring tool for comparing SLO management platforms. Evaluate each vendor against 120+ capabilities derived from enterprise best practices.
Name Your Vendors to Compare
Nobl9
Reference
Common Pitfalls the Platform Must Help Prevent
| Pitfall | What the Platform Should Do |
|---|---|
| 100% targets | Warn or prevent 100% targets. Educate on error budgets. |
| Too many SLOs | Guide teams to start with 1-2 SLOs per service. Add more only for new actionable signal. |
| No owners | Require owner metadata. Track ownership via review compliance. |
| Alert fatigue | Default to multi-window burn-rate alerting. Provide alert presets. |
| Inconsistent labels | Support CI/CD label linting. Publish label validation schema. |
| Measuring infra, not UX | Tiering model separates user-facing from infrastructure SLOs. |
| Ignored error budgets | Budget status visible in dashboards. Integrates with standup workflows. |
| No-data blind spots | Default no-data anomaly detection. Make it hard to skip. |
| Set-and-forget SLOs | Review lifecycle with overdue tracking. Proactive notifications. |
| Flat structure | Labels and filtering that enable the four-layer tiering model. |
Reference
Key Questions to Ask Vendors
Use these during demos and evaluations to probe depth of capability.
Platform Architecture
- How are resources organized? Is there a project/folder hierarchy with scoped RBAC?
- What is the maximum number of SLOs, services, and data sources supported?
- How does the platform handle multi-tenancy across large organizations?
Data & Integration
- How many data sources are natively supported? Which ones?
- Do you support agent-based connections where credentials stay in our infrastructure?
- How is no-data detected? Can we configure different thresholds per service tier?
- Can we backfill/replay historical SLI data after a data source outage?
SLO Configuration
- Do you support both occurrences-based and time-slices budgeting?
- Can we create composite SLOs that span multiple teams and services?
- Is there an SLI Analyzer to evaluate metrics before committing to a target?
Alerting
- Do you support multi-window, multi-burn-rate alerting out of the box?
- How many alert policies can be attached to a single SLO?
- Do you provide alert presets/templates following SRE best practices?
- Which notification channels are natively supported?
Governance
- Do you have a review lifecycle with scheduled reviews and overdue tracking?
- How does RBAC work? Can we scope permissions to individual projects?
- Do you support SSO with SCIM group synchronization?
- Is there an audit trail for all SLO modifications?
SLOs-as-Code
- Is there a CLI tool for managing SLO definitions as YAML?
- Is there an official Terraform provider?
- Do you have pre-built CI/CD integrations (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI)?
- Can we enforce label policies via dry-run validation?
Operational Maturity
- What does your recommended onboarding process look like for new teams?
- How do you support the transition from pilot to organization-wide adoption?
- What guidance or tooling exists for error budget policy enforcement?