Define an SLO and error budget in Prometheus using recording rules and Grafana SLO plugin
domain: grafana.com · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
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Steps
Install the Grafana SLO plugin (grafana-slo-app) from the plugin catalog and enable it in grafana.ini
Create a Prometheus recording rule that computes a ratio metric for your good-event and total-event counters over a rolling window
In the Grafana SLO UI (or via the SLO HTTP API at /api/plugins/grafana-slo-app/resources/v1/slo), POST a JSON body specifying the slo name, description, target ratio, and the query expressions for ratio or threshold objectives
Verify the plugin auto-generates recording rules and alert rules in the configured ruler backend (Grafana-managed or Mimir ruler)
Open the auto-created SLO dashboard to inspect error budget burn over the chosen compliance window (default 30 days)
Tune the alerting thresholds by updating the SLO object and re-POSTing; confirm new alert rules appear in the Alertmanager
Known gotchas
The SLO plugin requires a Prometheus-compatible ruler (Mimir or Cortex) if you want server-side rule generation; a plain Prometheus scrape target alone is not sufficient
Grafana SLO free tier limits the number of SLOs per organization; check current limits in the plugin documentation before designing a large SLO catalog
Recording rule names generated by the plugin follow a fixed naming convention — do not manually rename them or the plugin dashboard queries will break
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