slo-generator 0.2.0

SLO generator

SLO Generator

slo-generator is a tool to compute Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Error Budgets and Burn Rates, using policies written in JSON format, and export the computation results to available exporters.

Description

slo-generator will query metrics backend and compute the following metrics:

• Service Level Objective defined as SLO (%) = GOOD_EVENTS / VALID_EVENTS
• Error Budget defined as ERROR_BUDGET = 100 - SLO (%)
• Burn Rate (speed at which you're burning the available error budget)

Policies

The SLO policy (JSON) defines which metrics backend (e.g: Stackdriver), what metrics, and defines SLO targets are expected. An example is available here.

The Error Budget policy (JSON) defines the window to query, the alerting Burn Rate Threshold, and notification settings. An example is available here.

Metrics backends

slo-generator currently supports the following metrics backends:

• Stackdriver Monitoring
• Prometheus

Support for more backends is planned for the future (feel free to send a PR !):

• Grafana
• Stackdriver Logging
• Datadog

Exporters

Exporters can be configured to send SLO Reports to a destination.

slo-generator currently supports the following exporters:

• Cloud Pub/Sub for streaming export.
• Stackdriver Monitoring for exporting SLO metrics to Stackdriver Monitoring (e.g: Burn Rate metric, SLO/SLI metric).
• BigQuery for exporting SLO report to BigQuery for deep analytics.

The exporters configuration is put in the SLO JSON config. See example in tests/unit/fixtures/slo_linear.json.

Basic usage (local)

Requirements

• Python 3
• gcloud SDK installed

Installation

slo-generator is published on PyPI. To install it, run:

pip install slo-generator

Write an SLO config file

See slo.json files in the tests/unit/fixtures/ directory to write SLO definition files.

Write an Error Budget Policy file

See error_budget_policy.json files in the tests/unit/fixtures/ directory to write Error Budget Policy files.

Run the slo-generator

slo-generator --slo-config=<SLO_CONFIG_FILE> --error-budget-policy=<ERROR_BUDGET_POLICY>

• <SLO_CONFIG_FILE> is the SLO config JSON file.

• <ERROR_BUDGET_POLICY> is the Error Budget Policy JSON file.

Use slo-generator --help to list all available arguments.

Usage in pipelines

Once the SLO measurement has been tested locally, it's a good idea to deploy a pipeline that will automatically compute SLO reports. This pipeline can be triggered on a schedule, or by specific events.

A few pipeline examples are given below.

Cloud Functions

slo-generator is frequently used as part of an SLO Reporting Pipeline made of:

• A Cloud Scheduler triggering an event every X minutes.
• A PubSub topic, triggered by the Cloud Scheduler event.
• A Cloud Function, triggered by the PubSub topic, running slo-generator.
• A PubSub topic to stream computation results.

Other components can be added to make results available to other destinations:

• A Cloud Function to export SLO reports (e.g: to BigQuery and Stackdriver Monitoring), running slo-generator.
• A Stackdriver Monitoring Policy to alert on high budget Burn Rates.

Below is a diagram of what this pipeline looks like:

Benefits:

• Frequent SLO / Error Budget / Burn rate reporting (max 1 every minute) with Cloud Scheduler.

• Real-time visualization by streaming results to DataStudio.

• Historical analytics by analyzing SLO data in Bigquery.

• Real-time alerting by setting up Stackdriver Monitoring alerts based on wanted SLOs.

An example of pipeline automation with Terraform can be found here.

Cloud Build

slo-generator can also be triggered in a Cloud Build pipeline. This can be useful if we want to compute some SLOs as part of a release process (e.g: to calculate a metric on each git commit or push)

To do so, you need to build an image for the slo-generator and push it to Google Container Registry in your project.

To build / push the image, run:

gcloud builds submit --config=cloudbuild.yaml . -s _PROJECT_NAME=<YOUR_PROJECT_NAME>

Once the image is built, you can call the Terraform generator using the following snippet in your cloudbuild.yaml:

---
steps:

- name: gcr.io/${_PROJECT_NAME}/slo-generator
  args: ['--slo-config', '${_SLO_CONFIG_FILE}', '--error-budget-policy', '${_ERROR_BUDGET_POLICY_FILE}']

Then, in another repo containing your SLO definitions, simply run the pipeline, substituting the needed variables:

gcloud builds submit . --config=cloudbuild.yaml --substitutions \
  _SLO_CONFIG_FILE=<YOUR_SLO_CONFIG_FILE> \
  _ERROR_BUDGET_POLICY_FILE=<_ERROR_BUDGET_POLICY_FILE> \
  _WORKSPACE=<ENV>

If your repo is a Cloud Source Repository, you can also configure a trigger for Cloud Build, so that the pipeline is run automatically when a commit is made:

resource "google_cloudbuild_trigger" "dev-trigger" {
  trigger_template {
    branch_name = "dev"
    repo_name   = "my-repo"
  }

  substitutions = {
    _SLO_CONFIG_FILE = "slo.json"
    _ERROR_BUDGET_POLICY_FILE = "error_budget_policy.json"
    _WORKSPACE = "dev"
  }

  filename = "cloudbuild.yaml"
}

resource "google_cloudbuild_trigger" "prod-trigger" {
  trigger_template {
    branch_name = "master"
    repo_name   = "my-repo"
  }

  substitutions = {
    _SLO_CONFIG_FILE = "slo.json"
    _ERROR_BUDGET_POLICY_FILE = "error_budget_policy.json"
  }

  filename = "cloudbuild.yaml"
}