Summary

In this chapter, we went over the basics of SLOs so that we could see how Prometheus can help enable the definition and adoption of SLOs in your organization. We also explored and experimented with two popular open-source tools – Sloth and Pyrra – that help make SLOs easy when using Prometheus by implementing best practices with minimal code involved. For example, we wrote >80% fewer lines of code using Pyrra than we would have if we wrote all the Prometheus rules by hand.

In our next (and penultimate) chapter, we’ll look at one of the most exciting projects in the observability space today: OpenTelemetry. We’ll see how OpenTelemetry seeks to unify observability signals and how Prometheus is able to be a part of that unification through both official support in Prometheus itself and extensions in the OpenTelemetry project’s code bases.