deveshEvery observability rollout I have joined mid-flight had the same shape: hundreds of dashboards, thousands of metrics, and no answer to the question “is the service okay right now?”
Dashboards without SLOs are decoration. An SLO forces the conversation that matters: what do users experience, how do we measure it, and how much failure is acceptable?
Start embarrassingly small. One user-facing journey. One metric — usually request success rate or latency at the load balancer. One target you can defend to a product manager. Alert only on burn rate against that target.
Once that loop works — SLO, burn-rate alert, error budget conversation — expand. You will find you need perhaps a tenth of the dashboards you were about to build, and the ones you keep will get looked at.