From Incident Counting to SLIs: How DigitalOcean Rethought Availability
Miguel Carrera
Our journey to truly understand our customer experience began with a hard look at our internal availability numbers at the start of 2025. We saw something uncomfortable: the numbers didn’t match our customers’ reality. Our monthly availability oscillated between 99.5% and 99.9%. Those peaks and valleys depended more on whether we declared a high-severity incident that month than on how the platform was actually performing. Customers were still experiencing issues and opening escalations, but th