Want to know the Metrics to Deliver User Happiness? | C2C Community

Want to know the Metrics to Deliver User Happiness?


Userlevel 5
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How do you quantify user happiness? It’s not easy to measure directly in our systems, but we can look for signals in the user journey. You may experience an outage or other problem that internally seems relatively small, but your users take to Twitter in droves and express their displeasure. Or, you may have a catastrophic event but receive few or no complaints from end users. It is impossible to get inside your users’ heads and see whether they are happy or not while using your service.

To overcome this problem, we use the happiness metrics also known as Service Level Indicators (SLIs). SLIs specify, measure, and track user journey success. They are quantifiable measures of reliability. SLIs tell you whether you are in or out of compliance with your SLO targets and are therefore in danger of making users unhappy.

Once you choose the services you want to measure, you can then think about the SLIs that you will use to measure users common tasks and critical activities. Choosing SLIs that represent the customer’s experience and obtaining accurate SLI measurements are two of the most difficult tasks that organizations undertake on their SRE journeys. The key to selecting meaningful SLIs is to measure reliability from the user’s perspective, not your perspective.

SLIs metrics measure an approximation of a customer’s experience using your service. Such as, availability is an important SLI, it should not be the only SLI you use to measure the reliability of your service. Request latency and error rate are also important metrics indicative of system health. Depending on your service, durability and system throughput should also be consider as metrics. The SLI measures your performance against the SLO. If you continue to miss your SLO, your user experience suffers, and you must take action to bring the SLI back into compliance with the SLO.

The process for identifying, measuring, and monitoring SLIs may seem daunting, keep in mind that having an imperfect SLI is better than no SLI. With your SLIs identified, you can set achievable and aspirational SLOs, a target level of performance for an aspect of your service. When the SLI is above the SLO threshold, you know customers are happy. If it falls below the target, your customers are typically unhappy. As your SLI and SLO practices mature, you can build more sophisticated SLIs that more closely correlate with end-user problems.

This chapter from the book "SLO Adoption and Usage in Site Reliability Engineering" explains how to select the best SLIs for your services, how to build SLIs, considerations for choosing measurement strategies, and, finally, how to use SLIs to set SLO targets.

Read more at 👉🏻 Constructing SLIs to Inform SLOs

 


5 replies

Userlevel 7
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Great post @ahmedtariq1!

Thanks for sharing! It’s a difficult task indeed. Especially to measure the reliability from the user’s perspective and not yours.

How do you manage that? Are you using Alpha - Beta Testers for that? Are you getting feedback from your customers?

Also what happens if the latency is exactly 300 ms or 500 ms. 

@jennworks40 @seijimanoan @Vick how do you measure it?

Thanks for sharing Chapter 4 from the book SLO Adoption and Usage in Site Reliability Engineering 

Userlevel 7
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Nice read.

@ilias, I don't deal much with SRE part for now, more focus is on DevOps. And I agree with you that it's a difficult task to measure reliability from especially user's perspective 

Userlevel 7
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Thanks for the clarification @Vick 😀

Userlevel 5
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We manage that by getting constant feedback from the customers and also by doing testing to remove the bugs. Well, @ilias if our latency is 99.99% then its a good news for us but if it decreases then user experience will be effected.

Userlevel 7
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Thanks @ahmedtariq1.

So, you get feedback from your customers on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly base about their UX?

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