Harness Service Reliability Management vs Sloth

Summary:

Harness and Sloth both provide SLO management capabilities. Harness Service Reliability Management (SRM) is a SLO management module that is part of a larger software delivery (CI/CD) platform. Harness SRM is designed to facilitate greater collaboration between SREs and Developers while also automating many actions related to SLO management like governing software deployments.

Sloth is an open-source “do it yourself” solution that provides value to SREs but requires more effort and has fewer features than all competing vendor solutions. Sloth could be a good option for SREs who are looking to heavily customize their SLO management solution since they can modify the source code as needed.

SaaS & On-Premises:

Harness SRM is available as either SaaS or self-managed software that can be deployed anywhere.

Sloth is available as an “on-prem” solution only.

Integrates with Change and Incident management sources:

Harness SRM shows deployments, Kubernetes change events, and incidents directly in context with SLO and Error budget changes. Harness allows you to drill down into these changes to determine the root cause of SLO violations.

Sloth is dependent on Grafana. Grafana can integrate with change and incident management solutions.

Integrates with leading observability solutions:

Harness SRM integrates with many of the leading monitoring, logging, and observability solutions to collect the data needed to build and track SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets.

Sloth only integrates with Prometheus.

Custom Reliability Policies:

Harness SRM contains a built in policy engine based on Open Policy Agent (OPA). This enables Harness users to define and enforce custom policies with via UI or via policy-as-code. Policies within Harness can be used to send notifications or to actively manage software delivery pipelines via reliability guardrails.

Sloth does not offer the ability to create reliability policies.

Reliability Guardrails integrated with CI/CD pipelines:

Harness SRM reliability guardrail policies are used to automatically determine if deployment pipelines should proceed or stop given the status of SLOs an Error Budgets. This makes it possible to effectively standardize and scale the management of pipelines via SLO management processes.

Sloth does not offer this capability.

Service Health Indicators:

Harness SRM can determine and display the health of application services using SLOs and/or metrics to derive the overall health. By using a combination of SLOs and metrics, Harness can provide a more precise calculation of service health.

Sloth can determine and display the health of application services using SLOs only.

Service Reliability Checks:

‍Harness SRM can determine the health of services across all stages of software delivery by using a combination of AI/ML techniques on logs and metrics and through error tracking. These capabilities make it possible for developers to proactively improve the quality and reliability of their application services before deploying to production.

Sloth does not offer service reliability checks.

Automated Deployment Verification and Rollback (Continuous Verification):

‍Continuous Verification is the process of monitoring your app for abnormalities after a deployment. For example, Continuous Verification could catch a latency issue or 5xx errors and automatically roll back your app to the previous version. The idea is to catch errors as quickly as possible – ideally, before customers notice – and make a seamless transition back to the prior version.

Harness provides Continuous Verification out of the box, effectively reducing risk and reputational damage from downtime. Harness supports many vendors, including Prometheus, Datadog, AppDynamics, New Relic, StackDriver, CloudWatch, and custom monitoring and observability tools.

Sloth does not offer this capability.

Correlation of Change Events to Service Health:

Harness SRM ingests change events and shows them on a timeline that is aligned with SLO and Error Budget charts. The user can select and drill down into specific timeframes to perform root cause analysis on the impacted SLOs.

Sloth does not offer this capability.

Correlation of Incidents to Service Health:

Harness SRM ingests incident events and shows them on a timeline that is aligned with SLO and Error Budget charts. The user can select and drill down into specific timeframes to perform root cause analysis on the impacted SLOs.

Sloth does not offer this capability.

Error Tracking:

Harness SRM is capable of detecting all run-time exceptions within Java applications and providing detailed debugging information so that developers can resolve problematic exceptions before they deploy to production. This improves the quality of software which also improves reliability over time.

Sloth does not offer error tracking capabilities.

Reliability Audit Trails:

Harness SRM keeps detailed audit logs of all activities including creating, editing, and deleting of SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets. This is in addition to the standard audit trails included with the Harness platform.

Sloth does not offer audit trails.

Fine-Grained Role-Based Access Control:

Harness enables full customization of role based access controls (RBAC) with the SRM module and across the larger platform. Harness RBAC was built to offer the ultimate in flexibility as required by the largest enterprises.

Sloth relies on Grafana’s permissions capabilities which are not customized for SLO management.

Unified Software Delivery Platform:

Harness SRM is the SLO management module of the Harness Software Delivery Platform. Each module can be used standalone (integrated as a best of breed solution to a DevOps toolchain) or as part of the platform. When used as part of the platform, each module passes meta-data and can provide greater levels of automation than if used standalone.

Sloth does not offer a unified software delivery platform.

*Please note: Our competitors, just like us, release updates to their products on a regular cadence. We keep these pages updated to the best of our ability, but there are bound to be discrepancies. For the most up-to-date information on competitor features, browsing the competitor’s new release pages and communities are your best bet.

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