Error Budget Calculator

Calculate your error budget by comparing actual availability against your SLA or SLO target. See how much downtime your service can tolerate, and whether you’re exceeding your allowed threshold.

Error budgets are a core part of SRE strategy. By quantifying the difference between target and actual availability, you can make informed decisions about launches, reliability work, and incident response. Use this calculator to evaluate your performance over time and adjust priorities accordingly.

FAQ: Error Budgets & SLOs for SREs

1) How are teams actually using error budgets in practice?
More mature teams tie error budgets to automated policies—like deployment freezes, incident escalations, or capacity planning. Less mature teams track them, but don’t act. The key difference is having objective, trusted data. Dotcom-Monitor provides third-party measurements so error budget decisions aren’t based on internal metrics alone.

2) How do I know if we’re burning too much error budget?
Track your actual availability over time and compare it to your SLO target. If measured uptime falls below the threshold, you’re exceeding your error budget. Dotcom-Monitor helps teams detect this early with continuous external monitoring and alerting.

3) Should error budgets include performance degradation, or just outages?
That depends on your SLI definitions. Some teams only track hard downtime; others include slow responses, elevated error rates, or partial failures. Dotcom-Monitor supports both approaches by measuring full page load times, HTTP status codes, and more.

4) Do SLIs need to be internal or external?
Both. Internal SLIs help debug, but external SLIs tell you what your users actually experience. Error budgets tied only to backend metrics (200s from Nginx, etc.) can mask real issues. Dotcom-Monitor gives you the external, user-facing perspective that internal observability misses.

5) When should we pause feature releases due to error budget burn?
Ideally, you define clear policies: for example, if more than 50% of your monthly budget is burned in the first week, freeze deployments. External monitoring like Dotcom-Monitor can serve as your objective signal to trigger these decisions.