Introduction
Every day we interact with a variety of systems both online and offline – from our visit to the bagel store to checking our email on mobile. Very commonly within the Reliability Engineering community we talk about Service Level Objectives (SLO’s), but rarely do we talk about the underpinning indicators that tell us whether a system is healthy. Typically, engineers begin picking the low hanging fruit objectives (such as request time and volume), rather than doing a full analysis of their dependencies and the metrics which are available to them from their systems or application. By leveraging the VALET (Volume, Availability, Latency, Errors, and Tickets) framework, teams can begin exploring their metrics and better define their “health” indicators – which will lead to more sustainable Service Level Objectives.