SLOs for AIM: Setting Service Level Objectives to Guarantee Trust in eAIP Feeds

Introduction As aeronautical information moves from static publications to continuous machine readable services the conversation must change from data correctness alone to predictable service delivery. Civil Aviation Authorities and ANSPs now publish authoritative eAIP feeds consumed by flight planning systems navigation database suppliers and operational tools. Defining clear service level objectives for Aeronautical Information Management turns promises into measurable outcomes. This article explains what SLOs are in the AIM context, recommends practical objectives, describes monitoring and governance patterns and shows how FlyClim eAIP helps deliver and demonstrate compliance. What is an SLO for AIM and why it matters A service level objective is a measurable target for a service attribute such as availability latency or correctness. In AIM an SLO describes the level of reliability consumers should expect from an authoritative feed. SLOs matter because downstream systems depend on timeliness and provenance to make operational decisions. Without SLOs it is hard to prioritize editorial effort define incident severity or negotiate SLAs with partners. Core SLOs to consider for eAIP feeds Availability of authoritative feeds Define the fraction of time that production API endpoints are available for successful requests. A typical objective might be 99.9 percent monthly uptime for primary endpoints and a higher target for read only signed archives. Latency from approval to feed availability Measure the time between final approver sign off and the authoritative artifact being available to subscribers. For AIRAC changes this may be measured in hours, for operational approved amendments it must be measured in minutes. Validation pass rate at authoring time Track the percentage of authored items that pass deterministic ICAO aligned validation without manual correction. A rising pass rate indicates better data quality upstream and reduced rework downstream. Consumer ingestion success rate Measure the percentage of subscribed consumers that successfully ingest and verify a staged release within the sandbox window prior to effective date. This metric captures real interoperability and onboarding health. NOTAM to AIP consistency score Assess the number of conflicts detected between proposed NOTAMs and the authoritative AIP state per release. The target should move toward near zero conflicts for critical categories. Signed artifact verification rate Monitor the percentage of consumers that successfully verify cryptographic signatures and checksums for published snapshots. Reliable verification builds trust in provenance. Time to recovery for publication incidents Define a target for how quickly the system can roll back to the last signed snapshot or publish a corrected artifact after detecting a critical error. Include both mean time to detect and mean time to restore. Retention and accessibility of audit evidence Set objectives for how long signed snapshots, validation reports and approval metadata are retained and how quickly they can be produced for regulators or investigators. How to define SLOs that are realistic and useful Start with consumers not technology. Interview airlines navigation database suppliers ANSPs and internal stakeholders to understand what levels of timeliness and integrity matter most to their operations. Prioritize SLOs that directly reduce operational risk or downstream costs. Use tiers for different feed types. Separate targets for AIRAC bound releases, non AIRAC operational changes and sandbox feeds. AIRAC targets emphasize discipline and traceability. Operational targets prioritize speed and safe gating. Make SLOs measurable and instrumented. Use precise definitions and automated measurements rather than subjective language. For example define latency as the elapsed time between approver timestamp and production endpoint delivering the signed artifact and provide the exact API call used to verify availability. Set error budgets and governance. Convert SLO targets into an error budget which is the allowable amount of unavailability or failures in a given window. Use the error budget to prioritize engineering and editorial effort and to trigger governance reviews when budgets are exhausted. Measurement, monitoring and alerting Instrument every stage of the publication pipeline. Key telemetry points include authoring commit times validation outcomes API health checks CDN metrics and consumer acknowledgement events from webhook deliveries. Build real time dashboards that combine operational telemetry with editorial process health. Display uptime, average latency, validation pass rate and consumer ingestion success side by side so AIM managers can correlate spikes with recent edits or staffing changes. Implement layered alerting. Use low severity alerts for validation regressions and high severity alerts for signature verification failures or production feed outages. Ensure on call procedures map to SLO severity levels. Use synthetic checks and contract tests. Regularly run synthetic ingestion tests that mimic a navigation database supplier parsing real exports. Contract tests catch regressions in expected payload shapes before downstream systems fail. Governance, SLAs and contractual alignment Translate SLOs into SLAs for external partners with clear definitions of responsibilities. Include verification steps that consumers are responsible for such as signature validation and agreed windows for reporting ingestion failures. Define escalation paths and remediation commitments. Contracts should detail how incidents affecting SLOs are investigated and what remedies or credits apply when agreed targets are missed. Include onboarding milestones. Make successful sandbox ingestion and signature verification a contractual step in onboarding so consumers do not rely solely on legacy PDFs. Operational playbook for setting and enforcing SLOs Inventory consumers and classify priority tiers. Not all consumers require the same cadence or latency so target critical partners first. Select initial SLO set and baseline. Choose three to five SLOs and run a 90 day baseline to understand current performance and to set realistic targets. Implement telemetry and dashboards. Instrument the pipeline and publish a public or partner facing SLO dashboard to increase transparency. Run an error budget cadence. Review error budgets weekly and use them to schedule improvements or to instigate a governance review when budgets are exceeded. Iterate with stakeholders. Use consumption feedback and incident post mortems to refine SLO definitions and thresholds. How FlyClim eAIP helps deliver and demonstrate SLOs Structured authoritative repository. FlyClim treats every AIP module as a versioned object with commit metadata and approval timestamps which precisely defines the starting point for latency measurements. Automated validation and preflight checks. Built in ICAO aligned validation engines improve the pass rate at authoring time and reduce downstream parsing failures. Validation reports are produced automatically and archived with each release. AIRAC automation and signed snapshots. FlyClim automates mapping repository states to AIRAC releases and produces cryptographically signed artifacts with trusted timestamps. These artifacts support signed verification SLOs and retention objectives. API first distribution, sandbox feeds and webhooks. Granular JSON and XML endpoints plus event hooks let consumers validate ingestion in a controlled window. FlyClim provides per consumer sandbox endpoints that make consumer ingestion success measurability straightforward. Monitoring hooks and observability. The platform exposes operational telemetry for availability and delivery success. FlyClim can integrate with monitoring stacks and provide dashboards that combine editorial and runtime metrics for SLO reporting. Incident playbooks and rollback. Built in versioning and signed snapshots make rollbacks and corrective publication fast and auditable which shortens mean time to recovery targets. Practical example SLO bundle for a medium sized CAA Availability target for production API 99.95 percent per month Latency target from approver sign off to production artifact availability median under 30 minutes for non AIRAC operational changes and under 6 hours for AIRAC commits Validation pass rate for authored modules at least 92 percent Consumer sandbox ingestion success rate 95 percent for enrolled partners in the 48 hour staging window Time to detect signature verification failures under 15 minutes and time to recovery under 2 hours for critical signature incidents Retention of signed snapshots and validation reports for a minimum of seven years with on demand retrieval in under 48 hours Conclusion and next steps Service level objectives bring discipline and transparency to modern aeronautical information management. They let AIM teams prioritize investments, reassure downstream consumers and prove operational maturity to regulators. Start small with a few measurable SLOs, instrument the pipeline, engage consumers with sandbox onboarding and use error budgets to guide continuous improvement. FlyClim eAIP provides the repository, validation, distribution and observability features that make SLO driven AIM practical and auditable. To discuss a pilot SLO program, request a demo or explore an SLO template tailored to your organisation visit https://eaip.flyclim.com or https://flyclim.com and contact me at davide@flyclim.com.