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Metrics, Dashboards and SLOs: prepositions with numbers for a reliability report

Teach prepositions with numbers and trends using this C1 English for IT lesson plan about a payments dashboard and its SLO.

Grammar
Prepositions with numbers (rose by 270 ms, rose to 450 ms, an increase in latency), verbs and nouns of change, rose sharply vs a sharp rise, and rounding words like roughly.
Topic
Reliability at a fictional payments startup: availability against a service level objective, the error budget and tail latency, with words such as burn rate and baseline.
Activities
A dashboard and a weekly report to read, an AI-voiced briefing, self-checking drills, a chat with the CFO and a wheel; homework is a report summary and a recorded walkthrough.

What's inside

  1. Chapter 1Warm-up: what's your dashboard hiding?

    • PictureUnlock
    • Open a box and discussOpen the boxUnlock
    • Study the words for talking about metricsVocabularyTry it
    • Match the beginnings and endings of the sentencesMatchUnlock

  2. Chapter 2Reading: a bad week in numbers

    • Look at the dashboard summaryReal-life documentTry it
    • Read the weekly reliability reportArticleUnlock
    • True or false? Check the dashboard and the reportTrue or falseUnlock
    • Choose the correct answer about the reportQuizUnlock

  3. Chapter 3Listening: twenty minutes before the review

    • Listen to Tom walk Maya through the dashboardListeningTry it
    • Transcript, for the teacherUnlock
    • Choose the correct answer about the conversationQuizUnlock

  4. Chapter 4Grammar: spikes, dips and plateaus

    • Study the scheme: describing dataGrammar schemeTry it
    • Choose the word that fits: verbs and nouns of changeChoose the optionUnlock
    • Drag the prepositions into the gapsDrag and dropTry it
    • Fill in the gaps with an adjective or an adverbFill in the gapsUnlock
    • Choose the description that matches the dataQuizUnlock

  5. Chapter 5Speaking: explain it to the CFO

    • Choose the best replies: explain the SLO to GrahamChatTry it
    • Spin the wheel and answerSpin the wheelUnlock

  6. Chapter 6Homework: your turn to report

    • Choose the correct option: avoid the classic mistakesChoose the optionUnlock
    • Find the matching pairs: trend verbs and their meaningsMemory gameUnlock
    • Write the summary of a weekly reliability reportWriting, checked by the teacherUnlock
    • Record a dashboard walkthroughSpeaking, checked by the teacherUnlock

22 exercises in 6 chapters. Start a 7-day free trial to open all of them, copy any part into your own lessons, and teach the lesson live.

Vocabulary

10 words and phrases from the lesson, each with a picture and audio in edio.

+7 more with pictures and audio in the lessonMore words

  • baseline
  • three nines
  • blip
  • drill down
  • at a glance
  • vanity metric
  • move the needle

Grammar: prepositions with numbers, trends and approximation

Describing data means saying what a metric did, by how much and roughly how big the numbers are. Learners keep by for the change, to for the new level, choose verbs and nouns of change, pair adverbs with verbs and adjectives with nouns, and round figures with words like roughly and just over.

Describing data: trends, numbers and approximation

What a metric did, by how much, and roughly how big the numbers are.

By is not to: prepositions with numbers

Rise by gives the amount of change; rise to, the new level; from … to, both ends; stand at, the current one: Our p99 rose by 270 ms, to 450 ms. After a noun, in names the metric and of the amount: an increase in latency, an increase of 150%.

PatternUse it forExample
rise / fall by + amountthe size of the changeOur p99 rose by 270 ms.
rise / fall to + levelthe new levelOur p99 rose to 450 ms.
from … to …the start and the endIt rose from 180 ms to 450 ms.
an increase / a spike in + metricwhat changeda sharp increase in latency
an increase / a fall of + amountthe size of the changean increase of 150%
peak / level off / stand ata point or a levelAvailability stands at 99.93%.

Verbs of change and their nouns

Up: rise, climb, surge, spike. Down: fall, dip, plunge. Flat: level off, plateau. Top: peak at. Up and down: fluctuate. Back to normal: recover. Most have a noun twin, so errors spiked can become a spike in errors.

Verbs of change

MovementVerbsExample
Uprise, increase, climb, go up · sudden and big: surge · sudden and brief: spikeOur p99 rose from 180 ms to 450 ms.
Downfall, drop, decline, go down · small: dip · sudden and big: plungeTraffic dipped slightly on Sunday.
Stop changinglevel off, plateau, stabilizeOur p99 leveled off at about 450 ms.
Top or bottompeak at, bottom out atConsumer lag peaked at 40,000 messages.
Up and downfluctuateTraffic fluctuates during the day.
Back to normalrecoverAvailability recovered after the rollback.

The same ideas as nouns

  • a rise
  • an increase
  • a surge
  • a spike
  • a fall
  • a drop
  • a decline
  • a dip
  • a plunge
  • a peak
  • a plateau
  • a recovery

Verb + adverb, or adjective + noun

The adverb goes with a verb, the adjective with a noun: rose sharply but a sharp rise, climbed steadily but a steady climb. Three spellings need care: steadily, dramatically and considerably.

Verb + adverb, or adjective + noun

Verb + adverb

  • rose sharply
  • dipped slightly
  • climbed steadily
  • fell dramatically
  • recovered gradually
  • increased considerably

Adjective + noun

  • a sharp rise
  • a slight dip
  • a steady climb
  • a dramatic fall
  • a gradual recovery
  • a considerable increase

Making the adverb

Most adjectives just add -ly: sharp → sharply, sudden → suddenly, marginal → marginally. Watch the spelling: steady → steadily, dramatic → dramatically, considerable → considerably. The adverb goes with a verb (rose sharply), the adjective with a noun (a sharp rise).

Approximation: roughly, just over, an order of magnitude

Not every figure needs its decimals. 31 of 43.2 minutes is roughly 70%; 12.2 minutes is just over 12; 1.2 s against 120 ms is an order of magnitude; ×2.5 is two and a half times as long; 20% is one in five.

  • roughly, approximately, about, around: not exact (roughly 70% of the budget)
  • just under / just over: a little below / above (just over 12 minutes = 12.2)
  • well under / well over: far below / above (well under 0.1%)
  • nearly, almost: a little less than (nearly 30% = 28%)
  • in the region of: somewhere around (in the region of 450 ms)
  • an order of magnitude: about ten times (1.2 s vs 120 ms)
  • a fraction of: a small part of (a fraction of a percent)
  • the vast majority: almost all (the vast majority of requests)
  • one in five (20%) · one in a thousand (0.1%)
  • double (×2) · triple (×3) · quadruple (×4) · halve (÷2)
  • two and a half times as long / high / big (×2.5)

SLO language

An SLO sets a target such as 99.9% availability over 30 days, or three nines. The downtime it allows is the error budget, here 43.2 minutes, which teams burn through. p50 is the median; p99 shows the slowest 1%, the tail.

  • availability target (SLO): 99.9% over 30 days, or three nines
  • error budget: the downtime the target allows: 0.1% of 43,200 minutes = 43.2 minutes
  • p50 latency (the median): half of all requests are faster than this
  • p99 latency: 99% of requests are faster; it shows the slowest 1%, the tail
  • burn (through) the budget: use it up ("We burned roughly 70% of it in one week.")

Typical mistakes

  • an increase of latency

    an increase in latency

    in + what changed; of + the amount (an increase of 20%).

  • Latency has risen with 30%.

    Latency has risen by 30%.

    The amount of change takes by, never with.

  • We rose the timeout to 5 seconds.

    We raised the timeout to 5 seconds.

    raise – raised – raised takes an object; rise – rose – risen never does.

  • a 30 percents increase

    a 30 percent increase (a 30% increase)

    A number before a noun has no -s: a 19-minute outage, a 30-day window.

More lessons on this grammar: Prepositions lessons and exercises

Try the prepositions with numbers exercises

Try them yourself: these are the same exercises your students do in edio.

More exercises

What's in the lesson

  • 10 auto-checked exercises
  • 3 games
  • 2 teacher-checked tasks
  • 1 real-life document
  • 1 article
  • 1 grammar scheme
  • 1 set of word cards
  • 1 audio clip
  • 1 picture
  • 1 transcript

The main objectives of this lesson are to:

  • use by for the size of a change and to for the new level: Our p99 rose by 270 ms. It rose to 450 ms.
  • describe a trend with a verb and an adverb or an adjective and a noun: rose sharply, a sharp rise, leveled off at about 450 ms
  • round figures the way listeners need them: roughly 70%, just over 12 minutes, two and a half times as long, one in five
  • explain an SLO and its error budget to a non-technical manager in two sentences, without jargon

Lesson 11 of English for IT C1 · Across the Company sits in the middle of the unit Docs, metrics and meetings, which covers READMEs, dashboards and follow-ups. Its multiples, such as two and a half times as long, extend the twice as … as comparisons of lesson 8, and lesson 12 closes the unit with reporting verbs. A dashboard puts exact numbers in front of people who need the gist, which is why rounding matters here as much as prepositions.

Students open boxes about the dashboards they check and the metrics nobody acts on, learn ten words with pictures and audio, from error budget and burn rate to vanity metric and move the needle, and match sentence halves. They read a dashboard summary and a weekly reliability report on the week after a ledger launch, with true-or-false and multiple-choice checks. In the listening, an AI-voiced dialogue, Tom walks Maya through the numbers before a leadership review. Four self-checking drills follow the scheme, from verbs of change to prepositions dragged into a report's gaps. In the speaking chapter, students explain the SLO to Graham, the CFO, in a chat, then spin a wheel of prompts.

Homework opens with two self-checking exercises, a gap-fill on classic mistakes and a memory match of trend verbs. Students then write the summary of a weekly reliability report from a set of figures and record a dashboard walkthrough for a non-technical manager; the teacher reviews both.

Grammar:
describing trends · prepositions with numbers · approximation
Topic:
metrics · SLOs · dashboards · reliability

Teaching tips

  • Use the group's own dashboard, with confidential numbers changed: each learner reports one metric with from … to, by and one rounding word such as roughly.
  • Sketch two lines on the board, a flat median and a tail that jumps, and ask which belongs on a slide for leadership. The report's note on averages settles it.
  • Say one fact three ways before the drag-and-drop: 180 ms to 450 ms becomes rose by 270 ms, rose to 450 ms and an increase of 150%.
  • Rehearse the CFO chat aloud with one-to-one clients: you play Graham, they answer without jargon, and then they cut their longest answer to two sentences for a slide.

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The whole course: English for IT C1 · Across the Company

15 lessons at C1 for people who build software, in American English, with definitions instead of translations. The people of Kestrel Cloud, a fictional payments startup, write updates, reviews, RFCs and postmortems, explain tech to non-tech colleagues and negotiate scope. Real cases include the CrowdStrike outage and the xz backdoor.See the course

  1. Unit 1 Talking to the team

    async updates, code review and plain explanations: the future perfect, hedging, cleft sentences

    1. Lesson 1Async Stand-ups: Status Updates People Can Act OnFuture forms for status updates
    2. Lesson 2Code Review Without the DramaHedging in code review
    3. Lesson 3Explaining Tech to Non-Tech PeopleIt-clefts and wh-clefts

  2. Unit 2 Shipping and incidents

    estimates, releases and outages: conditionals without if, phrasal verbs, modal perfects

    1. Lesson 4Estimates, Deadlines and Saying No (Politely)Conditionals without if and mixed conditionals
    2. Lesson 5Release Day: Rolling Out and Rolling BackPhrasal verbs and their noun forms
    3. Lesson 6Incident! Learning from the CrowdStrike OutageModal perfects and narrative tenses

  3. Unit 3 Security and design

    advisories, trade-offs and RFCs: passive reporting structures, concession and contrast, nominalization

    1. Lesson 7Security Advisory: The xz BackdoorPassive reporting structures
    2. Lesson 8System Design: Every Choice Has a CostConcession, contrast and modified comparatives
    3. Lesson 9Writing an RFC That Gets ApprovedNominalization and formal register

  4. Unit 4 Docs, metrics and meetings

    READMEs, dashboards and follow-ups: participle clauses, describing trends, reporting verbs

    1. Lesson 10Docs People Actually ReadReduced relative clauses and participle clauses
    2. Lesson 11 · you're hereMetrics, Dashboards and SLOsPrepositions with numbers, trends and approximation
    3. Lesson 12Meeting Notes and Follow-upsReporting verbs and their patterns

  5. Unit 5 Retros, interviews and AI

    looking back and ahead: wish and would rather, inversion, formal obligation and permission

    1. Lesson 13The Retro: What Went Wrong This QuarterWish, would rather and it's high time
    2. Lesson 14The Interview: Selling Your AchievementsInversion for emphasis
    3. Lesson 15AI at Work: Writing the Team's RulesObligation and permission in formal rules

Questions about this lesson

When do you use "by" and "to" with numbers?
Use by for the amount of change, to for the level: Our p99 rose by 270 ms says how far it moved; It rose to 450 ms says where it ended. From … to gives both ends: It rose from 180 ms to 450 ms. A level or a peak takes at: It leveled off at about 450 ms. The amount never takes with: risen by 30%, not risen with 30%.
What's the difference between a spike, a surge and a dip?
A spike is a sudden, brief jump that drops back; a surge is a sudden, big rise; a dip is a slight, short fall. Their neighbors on a graph: plunge for a sudden, big fall, climb for a slow, steady rise, level off for no more change, fluctuate for up and down, and recover for back to normal. Most also work as nouns: errors spiked, a spike in errors.
What does "an order of magnitude" mean?
An order of magnitude means about ten times bigger or smaller: a query that took 1.2 seconds before a fix and 120 ms after it got an order of magnitude faster. Two orders of magnitude means about a hundred times. Engineers use the phrase for quick comparisons, along with other rounded figures such as two and a half times as long (×2.5), just over 12 minutes (12.2) or one in five (20%).
Is it "an increase in" or "an increase of"?
Use both, for different things: in before the metric, of before the amount. So it's a sharp increase in latency and a spike in 5xx errors, but an increase of 300% and a fall of 20 ms. One phrase can hold both: an increase of 150% in p99 latency. An increase of latency is the slip to avoid, and a drag-and-drop in Metrics, Dashboards and SLOs, a C1 lesson on edio.ai, targets it.
Is it "a 30-day window" or "a 30-days window"?
It's a 30-day window, with no -s: when a number and a noun describe another noun, they act as one adjective, take a hyphen and stay singular, as in a 19-minute outage. Elsewhere the plural is normal: It was down for 19 minutes. Percent doesn't take -s after a number either: a 30 percent increase. A homework drill in the C1 lesson Metrics, Dashboards and SLOs on edio.ai tests both points.
What is an error budget?
An error budget is the amount of downtime a reliability target allows. With a target of 99.9% availability over 30 days, that's 0.1% of 43,200 minutes, or 43.2 minutes. Teams watch how fast they use it, the burn rate, and say so plainly: We burned roughly 70% of it in one week. In Metrics, Dashboards and SLOs on edio.ai, the team's policy stops releases to the payments path once the budget is gone.
What is a service level objective (SLO)?
A service level objective is a reliability target for a service over a set window, such as 99.9% availability over 30 days, which engineers call three nines. The SLO sets the error budget, and dashboards show the service against it: Availability stands at 99.93%, above target, but only just. A target of 100% isn't realistic: every step closer to it costs far more and slows releases down.
What does p99 latency mean?
p99 latency is the response time that 99% of requests beat, so it shows the slowest 1%, the tail. p50 is the median: half of all requests are faster. The two can tell different stories: The median barely moved, from 45 ms to 48 ms, but p99 climbed from 180 ms to 450 ms. That's why engineers report tail latency, not just averages.
How do you explain an SLO to a non-technical manager?
Give the headline, then make each number concrete: Short answer: it's above target, but only just. Turn the percentage into time (about 43 minutes of downtime in any 30-day window) and the impact into plain words (the slowest 1% of payments went from about 180 to 450 milliseconds). Leave out jargon such as burn rate. The CFO chat in Metrics, Dashboards and SLOs, a C1 lesson on edio.ai, rewards exactly these replies.
How do I teach prepositions with numbers to professionals?
Start from one real metric and say it several ways: It rose from 180 ms to 450 ms. It rose by 270 ms. That's an increase of 150%. Learners then match each form to the question it answers, how much or to what level. Add rounding words, then a spoken report on a dashboard the group knows. Metrics, Dashboards and SLOs, a C1 lesson on edio.ai, also puts the numbers before the drills.
What's good homework for practicing trends and numbers?
Good homework is a short report written from a set of real figures: a summary that uses by, to and from … to, two trend verbs, one rounding word and a recommendation. A recorded walkthrough of a dashboard for a non-technical manager practices the same language aloud. This lesson sets both for the teacher to review, after a self-checking gap-fill on classic mistakes and a memory match of trend verbs.
Are there interactive exercises for prepositions with numbers?
Yes: drag-and-drop gaps and chat role-plays check each preposition as learners work. This page plays four parts of Metrics, Dashboards and SLOs, a C1 lesson on edio.ai, without an account: a payments dashboard summary, Tom's briefing for Maya before a leadership review, a drag-and-drop with by, to, at, in and of, and a chat in which students explain the SLO to the CFO. The other exercises are locked.
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