Announcing Public Preview of Azure Monitor SLIs 

Today, we are excited to introduce Service Level Indicators (SLI) and Service Level Objectives (SLO) in Azure Monitor a step forward in helping teams measure how customers are experiencing their applications.

SLI: A quantitative measure of how well an application or service is performing from the customer’s point of view.

SLO: A defined target for an SLI that represents how good or bad the SLI is over a given time-period. This is also referred to as a baseline in Azure Monitor.

One of the biggest advantages of SLIs is that they quantify real customer impact. In many environments, multiple alerts may fire across infrastructure and services—but not all of them translate to user-visible issues. Metrics like CPU Percentage can measure what is happening in an environment, but not always indicate whether, or how, a spike in CPU impacted the user experience. SLIs provide a clear lens to evaluate whether those signals actually affect customers, helping teams cut through noise and focus on what truly matters. This also represents a shift from traditional thinking about reliability. An application can be “up” and still feel slow or unreliable to users due to latency, partial failures, or downstream dependencies. On the flip side, not every system issue results in a degraded user experience. SLIs bridge this gap by helping measure actual customer experience, not just uptime. 

This release brings native SLI authoring, error budgets, as well as a baseline (SLO) and burn rate–based alerting directly into Azure Monitor. Instead of reacting to isolated metrics or alerts, teams can now answer, are we meeting our customer’s promise? 

Overview: What is Azure Monitor SLI?

You can now measure both Availability and Latency SLIs using the Request or windows-based evaluation methods. 

In Azure Monitor, SLIs are defined at the Service Group level, a logical representation of your application composed of multiple resources. This enables a shift from resource-level monitoring, fragmented alerts to Application-level health, customer-impact measurement and actionable signals. SLIs continuously evaluate your service using existing Azure Monitor metrics and store results in your Azure Monitor Workspace.  

These SLIs then power downstream experiences such as baseline tracking, error budgets, burn rate visualization, and alerting—all within Azure Monitor. While Error budgets help teams determine how much degradation they can afford within a given time window and guide decisions such as whether to continue feature rollouts or prioritize reliability improvements. Burn rates indicate how quickly the error budget is being consumed, enabling teams to detect excessive degradation early and take corrective action before user experience is significantly impacted. 

Getting Started

To create Application SLIs, you’ll need: 

• A Service Group. 
• You must be emitting metrics about your application to an AMW (via Managed Prometheus or Open Telemetry) 

Learn more here.

Summary

Azure Monitor SLI brings service health management directly into the Azure platform. By focusing on user experience, tracking error budgets, and alerting on burn rates, teams can understand their workload health alongside platform signals, move from reactive monitoring to proactive reliability engineering and prioritize issues based on real user impact. 

We’re excited to see how you use Azure Monitor SLIs to build more reliable applications on Azure.