🎉 Sloth v0.13.0: SLO Plugins Are Here!

[slok]

Hello there! 👋

After a few months, we’re back on track with one of the biggest Sloth releases since day one: SLO plugins. This change refactors the Sloth core to make it pluggable, extensible, and much easier to customize. From validators to Prometheus rule generators, everything can now be swapped, extended, or completely replaced.

Disclaimer: SLO plugins are experimental. I’ve done testing and some kind users have already been running main in production, but, still needs more production testing in the following weeks/months.

🔌 What Are SLO Plugins?

Think of SLO plugins as a chain of processors. Each processor takes care of one step: validating SLOs, generating SLI rules, creating alerts, and so on.

You can hook into the chain at three levels:

• App level: Runs for every SLO managed by Sloth.
• SLO group level: Runs on all SLOs in a single spec file.
• SLO level: Runs on an individual SLO.

By default, the chain reflects the regular Sloth logic. You can extend it, replace parts of it, or reorder processors using priorities.

📚 Documentation

Want to dive deeper? Check out the docs:

• SLI vs. SLO plugins
• How SLO plugins work
• Example SLO plugin
• Default core plugins
• Overriding the full Sloth logic

🎒 SLO plugin examples

Check this repository.

🚀 What’s Next?

Contrib Plugins

This release is all about the plugin engine itself. Next up, we’ll start building contrib plugins, “semi-official” plugins maintained by the community. First in line: a VictoriaMetrics validator plugin.

Plugin Maintainers

With contrib plugins, we’ll also bring in new maintainers to look after them.

That’s all for now. Thanks for your patience, if you have doubts/opinions/examples you can use this same release discussion so we talk about them.

Happy SLO-ing! 🤘

[wbollock]

Woohoo! Some other plugin proposals that were Sloth features on our fork:

• feat: adjustable rule_group interval #515
• feat: add custom labels to sloth_slo_info metric linode-obs/sloth#4

I'll also try to finish my draft 😅 slok/sloth-test-slo-plugins#5

Looking forward to other plugin ideas, too 🎉