An agreed-upon target within an Service Level Agreement (SLA) that must be achieved for each activity, function, and process to provide the best opportunity for customer success. In layman’s terms, service level objectives represent the performance or health of a service.

These can include business metrics, such as conversion rates, uptime, and availability; service metrics, such as application performance; or technical metrics, such as dependencies to third-party services, underlying CPU, and the cost of running a service. For example, if the SLA for a website is 99.95% uptime, its corresponding SLO could be 99.95% availability of the login services. Organizations commonly use SLOs in production environments to ensure released code stays within error budgets.