Your system is fine. Your users aren't
7 points by dunyakirkali
7 points by dunyakirkali
This reminds me of "my nines are not your nines", https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/07/15/giant/ which is about how you need to be monitoring from individual customers' points of view. You might have 99% API requests succeeding but that's actually 100% of requests failing for 1% of your customers and 100% of them succeeding for everyone else.
a company I once was working for used "amount of people company helped" in medical domain. It was one of the best metrics I've ever seen. It was related to implants and surgeries and I am super happy they reached a million people in a few years
Feels like slop.
Yes it might be. These "business" SLOs would also be failing constantly, and require constant tweaking. There may be no drivers due to external factors such as holidays or a parade or a bazillion other reasons. I guess in some places it is more likely to succeed than others, and there may be use cases for it, I guess.
Yes, the practice of tweaking and meeting those SLO's is often called "running a business".
If there's a parade you might have lower demand because everyone is at the parade, higher demand because everyone's going to/from the parade, and it's gonna change based on events and traffic and weather. You need to understand your area, and communicate with your drivers, offer overtime/incentives, etc until you've adapted to meet your goals. This requires understanding how the area and its events work, which is hard to transfer between people or encode in business rules (though not impossible).
Looking at rplacy's example, if your business SLO is "move people" rather than "take people's Uber money" then on a day with a parade or sports game or something you might want to do a discount shuttle service to/from public transit hubs.
Right! I thought the article was talking about systems monitoring, but it may be that it is talking about something totally different.