# SLO Status: Seedling An SLO, or service level objective, is a target for how reliable a service should be. ## Mental Model An SLO turns vague reliability expectations into a measurable target. Example: ```text 99.9% of valid API requests should complete successfully within 300 ms over 30 days. ``` ## Why It Matters SLOs help teams make decisions about: - Reliability work. - Launch readiness. - Error budgets. - Incident severity. - Whether to slow down feature work. ## Related - [[Field Notes/Tail Latency]] - [[Field Notes/Incident Review]] - [[Topics/Production Engineering]]