Turning SLOs into rules

In this section, we will see how objectives can be turned into actionable rules by creating contextual checkpoints from the pipeline or externally. At the start of any rule is the expectation, which can be defined as "What does the consumer expect from the dataset?"

An expectation formalizes the objective into a rule and the corresponding metric to be tracked. The expectation is then a good way to document the objectives and the metrics needed to respect them. The two components of the expectation have their importance: the rule tells the observer how the data should behave, and the metric is used to detect whether the behavior is deviant or not.

Let’s look at the different types of rules that we can set.

Different types of rules

The backbone of a rule is the indicator. Based on this, a rule can be set and will start checking how the metric is behaving. These rules are often guided by the principles of data quality discussed in Chapter...