Backyards (now Cisco Service Mesh Manager) provides, out-of-the-box, Service Level Objective-based monitoring and alerting solutions for monitoring HTTP/GRPC-based microservice latencies and error rate characteristics. The decision to only provide these Service Level Indicators as part of the base installation was due to the fact that only Istio itself is able to provide the metrics they require. On the other hand, as we had briefly discussed in the Tracking and enforcing SLOs webinar, the SLO-based measurement of systems can not and should not be limited to these three measurements.

We previously covered the basics of burn rates in our last blog post about enforcing SLOs and in our Tracking and enforcing SLOs webinar. Even if the basic concept is clear (if a burn rate is greater than 1, the SLO is in danger), it can be difficult to develop a strategy for alerts based on burn rate values. Of course, when implemented properly, burn rate-based alerting ensures that Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are enforced and met.