Service-Level Objectives (SLOs)

Create and manage SLOs in Elastic Observability. SLOs track service performance against measurable targets using service-level indicators (SLIs) computed from Elasticsearch data.

Authentication

SLO operations go through the Kibana API. Authenticate with either an API key or basic auth:

# API key
curl -H "Authorization: ApiKey <base64-encoded-key>" -H "kbn-xsrf: true" <KIBANA_URL>/api/observability/slos

# Basic auth
curl -u "$KIBANA_USER:$KIBANA_PASSWORD" -H "kbn-xsrf: true" <KIBANA_URL>/api/observability/slos

For non-default spaces, prefix the path: /s/<space_id>/api/observability/slos.

Include kbn-xsrf: true on all POST, PUT, and DELETE requests.

SLI Types

Type	API value	Use case
Custom KQL	`sli.kql.custom`	Raw logs — good/total using KQL queries
Custom metric	`sli.metric.custom`	Metric fields — equations with aggregations
Timeslice metric	`sli.metric.timeslice`	Metric fields — per-slice threshold check
Histogram metric	`sli.histogram.custom`	Histogram fields — range/value_count
APM latency	`sli.apm.transactionDuration`	APM — latency threshold
APM availability	`sli.apm.transactionErrorRate`	APM — success rate
Synthetics availability	`sli.synthetics.availability`	Synthetics monitors — uptime percentage

Guidelines

objective.target is a decimal between 0 and 1 (for example 0.995 for 99.5%).
Timeslice metric indicators require budgetingMethod: "timeslices".
Updating an SLO resets the underlying transform — historical data is recomputed.
The cluster needs nodes with both transform and ingest roles.
Use POST .../slos/{id}/_reset when an SLO is stuck or after index mapping changes.
Group-by SLOs create one instance per unique value — avoid high-cardinality fields.
Synthetics SLOs are auto-grouped by monitor and location; do not set groupBy manually.
Burn rate alert rules are not auto-created using the API — set them up separately.

observability-manage-slos

Service-Level Objectives (SLOs)

Authentication

SLI Types

Guidelines