Interactive Visual Exploration of Service Level Objectives

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) describe the desired behavior of a service. They present agreed-upon target behaviors (e.g. capacity, performance, availability, cost) that the clients of a service can expect, and that the service provider can manage against. Both clients and service providers need a way to monitor how a service is doing against its SLOs, and display the result of that monitoring in an intuitive fashion. This paper describes a tool that provides interactive visual exploration for services; makes it easy to navigate around the multi-dimensional space of services, their instances, users, and metrics; and is driven by the machinereadable description of the SLO itself, so that changes can be propagated automatically. The contributions of the paper include a description of the requirements and implementation of our system; the techniques used to display aspects of — and navigate around — the multi-dimensional space; and how the SLOs are used to automate the display of service-specific information.