Nobl9 announced The State of Service Level Objectives (SLOs) 2022, a new survey of over 300 IT managers and executives conducted with Dimensional Research. As SLOs grow in popularity, more than 8 out of 10 companies are planning to increase their use. In fact, SLOs are being used to provide visibility into their use of new technologies. For example, 87% stated using SLOs for microservices would increase their performance. While many would expect SLOs to be used purely for IT operations, this research also shows that increasingly business teams (executives, manufacturing, R&D, marketing, finance, etc.) are using SLOs.

"The evidence is clear. It's not a question of if enterprises will adopt SLOs, but rather how they will do it," said Marcin Kurc, co-founder and CEO, Nobl9. "This research validates our own experiences about the observability market from our interactions with enterprise customers in the financial services, retail, media and entertainment, and manufacturing industries. SLOs are becoming essential to enterprises who are striving to define the right level of service and improve business outcomes in an increasingly digital world."

Critical Observability

Most companies have a wide array of observability and monitoring tools. They commonly provide visibility into IT operations, but that data now also provides information directly into the business needs for security, compliance, AI/ML, and other uses. However, even with the large number of monitoring and observability solutions deployed, less than half of the companies surveyed have visibility into all their IT environments, and hybrid-cloud use is compounding the issue.Given the swift adoption of containers and microservices, it was staggering to see just 45% and 35% have visibility into those systems respectively.

Service level objectives (SLOs) adoption has grown as more than 8 out of 10 companies are increasing their use. In fact, SLOs are being used to provide visibility into and to measure new technologies. This trend is supported by the overwhelming 94% that intend to map SLOs directly to business operations, and a significant 91% that indicate SLOs are improving decision making.

In fact, more than 6 out of 10 companies indicated that SLOs aligned to business operations have already prevented business impact and disruptions. Given the tremendous value of SLOs, it is of little surprise that 71% of companies not using SLOs today plan to adopt them. In a world where technology quite literally enables and facilitates most businesses, visibility is key, to know what is going on, optimize business operations and decision making, and provide early warning indicators to stave off potential business losses.

"IT has forever been chasing visibility and metrics of performance, but with IT enabling much of today's businesses it is not surprising that SLOs are being heavily adopted," said David Gehringer, principal, Dimensional Research. "The business requires high levels of reliability, performance and availability and increasing leaders want to measure in the language of the business not just IT operational metrics." 

SLOs Adoption Growing to Provide Visibility, Improve Decisions, and Protect the Business from Disruptions

Key findings show:

• 94% of companies intend to map SLOs directly to business operations, with 58% already doing so today
• 91% agree that SLOs drive improved business decision making 
• 82% of companies using SLOs plan on increasing their use
• 71% of companies not currently using SLOs plan to
• 67% have used SLOs to prevent potential business impacts
• 87% indicate SLOs would improve microservice performance

All respondents had observability and monitoring responsibilities.