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System Health Review report

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The System Health Review report provides a simplified way to monitor and report on your system's reliability and performance. It's specifically designed for recurring reliability check-in meetings, giving you an efficient overview of your system health over time.

System Health Review is targeted at:

  • System administrators monitoring day-to-day operations
  • Technical managers tracking team performance
  • Upper management making strategic decisions

The report presents SLO data in an easy-to-understand format that supports informed decision-making across all organizational levels.

Report overview​

System Health Review is a table-formatted report. It groups your Nobl9 SLOs by projects, services, and labels of your choice through the remaining error budget metric.

The report gives both aggregated and detailed views of the overall system health for SLOs residing in selected projects or services. The four color-coded categories reflect the available error budget of the SLOs:

Healthy SLOs
This icon and color indicates SLOs with enough error budget left within their time window.
Exhausted SLOs
This icon and color indicates SLOs with error budget fully exhausted within their time window.
SLOs at risk
This icon and color indicates SLOs with error budget at risk of being fully exhausted within their time window.
No data SLOs
This icon and color indicates SLOs that haven't gathered data.
System Health Review report

The report aggregates SLO health information to provide quick glimpses into the performance of your system.

Depending on the grouping option set for the report, the table rows display one of the following:

  • Project rows—project names
  • Service rows—service names
  • Label value rows—label values
  • Custom rows—your defined row names

The first cell of the header row displays the grouping indicator—Projects, Services, your selected label key, or Custom rows.

The Project grouping configuration
The Project grouping report configuration

You can sort the table by SLO's remaining error budget. For this, click the required column header:

Sorting by SLO' remaining error budget

Aggregated columns and rows​

The report shows SLO health as percentages in each cell, with color-coded categories you define when creating the report:

  • Healthy SLOs have sufficient error budget remaining
  • At-risk SLOs have an error budget running low
  • Exhausted SLOs have an error budget fully consumed
  • No data SLOs have insufficient data for calculation

Four levels of aggregation:

  • Overall (top-left cell) shows the health distribution across all SLOs in the report
  • By row (right column) shows health distribution for all SLOs in a particular project / service / label
  • By column (top row) shows health distribution for all SLOs matching that column's labels
  • By cell (intersections) shows health distribution for all SLOs that fall into particular cells
View the example of aggregation levels
  • In the entire report: 13% of all SLOs are exhausted, 26.1% are at risk, and 60.9% are healthy
  • Team Operations on all environments: 12.5% exhausted SLOs, 23% at risk, and 62.5% healthy SLOs
  • All teams on the staging environment: 50% exhausted SLOs, 0% at risk, and 50% healthy SLOs
  • Team Operations on staging: 33% exhausted SLOs and 25% healthy SLOs
SLO aggregations
SLO aggregation in columns and rows

SLOs display logic​

The report only displays SLOs pre-filtered in Step2: Filter resources. The further display logic depends on the layout configuration.

  • Table cell display
    SLOs displayed match both layout criteria—for rows and columns.
    • Tagged with the labels selected for each column, AND
    • Satisfy the row filters:
      • Reside in projects or services, OR
      • Have the labels or label values as specified for the row grouping
  • Label filtering logic for columns
    When multiple labels are assigned to a column, Nobl9 applies the filter combination logic:
    • Same key, different values: SLOs must match ANY of the values (OR logic)
    • Different keys: SLOs must match ALL keys (AND logic)
      Example:
      If a column has these labels: environment: staging OR environment: production AND team: operations, SLOs must have all label keys but can match either value.
      I.e. SLOs will appear in this column if they have:
      • environment: staging AND team: operations, OR
      • environment: production AND team: operations
  • Grouping in Label value rows configuration
    SLOs with the specified labels are displayed in the report, where:
    • Columns are populated by selected full labels (key-value pairs)
    • Rows are populated by a selected key, where all of its available values become the row headers
    • The Ungrouped SLOs row appears when your report includes SLOs that match report filters and have column labels, but miss the label selected for row grouping
    • The cells at the intersection of a column and a row contain the SLOs that match both the column's full label and the row's key value
    Column groupings
  • Grouping in Custom rows configuration
    The table cells display SLOs that have the following labels:
    • Set for a column
    • Set for a row

You can view labels assigned to columns and rows. For this, hover the cursor over the required column or row header cell:

Viewing labels

From the perspective of reporting time frame, the report can be:

Real-time
Real-time reports reflect the state of selected SLOs at the latest data point received by Nobl9 within the last hour. Choose this option to review the most up-to-date state of your system.
Retrospective
Retrospective reports show the historic state of selected SLOs. You can additionally define a recurrence rule (rrule) to update historic data in the report regularly [1]. Retrospective reports also display SLO health trends [2].
rrule
System Health Review report for the past timepoint with added recurrence rule (no. 1) and SLO health trends (no. 2)
SLO health trends

SLO health trends represent the remaining error budget metric trends for the latest reporting period.

For example, in reports generated every Monday (available with rrule), the trend will reflect the comparison between the previous and current Mondays.

Create a System Health Review report​

You can create the System Health Review report on the Nobl9 Web or applying a YAML configuration in sloctl.

  1. On the Nobl9 Web, go to Reports.
  2. Click .

Step 1: Name report and choose its type

  1. Enter the display name for your report.
    You can edit it at any time.
  2. Select the System Health Review report type.

Step 2: Filter resources

The resources you select define the scope of your report.

  1. Select at least one project, service, or service level objective to be included in your report.
    These fields are interdependent: selecting a project defines the list of available services and SLOs, and selected SLOs narrow down the list of available services and projects.
  2. Optional: Select labels to add more resources to your report.

Step 3: Define report layout

Your report layout depends on the row grouping you choose and the columns you configure.

Preview table

The table below shows the report structure preview—your actual data will appear once you complete the configuration.

  1. Set Row grouping to define the rows:
    • Project rows displays project names in header rows and SLOs from these projects in cells
    • Service rows displays service names in header rows and SLOs from these services in cells
    • Label value rows displays the values of the selected label key in header rows and SLOs labeled with the correspondent key-value pair
    • Custom rows displays the custom row names you define and SLOs tagged with the labels you selected for each row
  2. Configure table rows (for the Custom row grouping) and columns:
    • Enter the required row or column names and select labels for each
    • To add rows, click + at the bottom of the table (up to 50 columns per report)
    • To add columns, click + on the right side of the table (up to 30 columns per report)
    • To remove rows or columns, hover over it and click that appears above the column or to the left of the row
      Adding and removing columns

Step 4: Configure thresholds

Thresholds define report categories: Exhausted, At risk, and Healthy.

  1. Specify how much of the SLOs' remaining error budget define exhausted and healthy SLOs.
    • SLOs with the error budget remaining between these values fall into the At risk category.
    • You can reset the thresholds to their default values set by your organization admin for the Service health dashboard.
  2. Set the visibility of the At risk category and SLOs that report no data.
    • Hide At risk and set the same values for Exhausted and Healthy, so your report includes only two categories.
    • Deselect SLOs without data to have these SLOs in your report.

Step 5: Select reporting time

You can create a one-time report based on the latest data or retrospective. Retrospective reports can be one-time or recurring.

To create the report based on the latest data, select Real-time and specify the time zone.

For Retrospective, do the following:

  1. Set the date, time, and time zone: your report will show the state of your selected SLOs as of the moment you specified.
  2. Specify the Repeat rule for your report:
    • With any option except for Don't repeat, Nobl9 will update the report as frequently as you select.
    • Select Custom when no repeat option fits your needs:
      • Enter your custom recurrence rule in the iCalendar format or use the rrule generator.
      • Omit specifying the date, time, and time zone in the rrule—you already have them set.
      • The minimum recurrence frequency is DAILY.

Key points to consider​

The behavior of your report is determined by the row grouping option you select. The following tables provide the summary of what to expect with each choice.

Table: Row configuration

Grouping optionConfigurationDescription
Project rows
Service rows		AutomaticRows are automatically added and populated based on the projects or services you select. The rows are sorted alphabetically by project or service name.
Label value rowsAutomaticRows are automatically added and populated based on the values of your chosen label key. The rows are sorted alphabetically by value.
Custom rowsManualRows are defined by you. You can add as many rows as you need, assigning a custom name and one or more labels to each.

Table: No matching SLOs display

Grouping optionReason for no matching SLOs
Project rows
Service rows		There are no SLOs in the project or service (defined by the row) that also have the labels selected for the column.
Label value rows
Custom rows		There are no SLOs with the label(s) for that row that also have the labels selected for the intersecting column.

Dynamic report updates
All reports are updated dynamically in response to the following triggers:

Table: System limits and capabilities

ConditionLimit/BehaviorDescription
Maximum rows50Maximum number of rows allowed for the Custom rows grouping option
Maximum columns30Maximum number of columns allowed per report
Historical data retention2 yearsMaximum historical data available for retrospective reports
Minimum report frequencyDailyMost frequent schedule allowed for recurring reports
Empty contentNot displayedProjects or services containing no SLOs are automatically excluded from display
Query delay impact

If any of your SLOs use a data source with an extended query delay, "latest" type reports will show your system's state delayed by the configured query delay period.

Check out these related guides and references:
Reliability and error budget calculationsSLO guidesQuery delayData source configuration: query delaySLOsTroubleshootingrrule generatoriCalendar specification
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