Reliability & operations · Glossary term
What is Error Budget?
The amount of unsuccessful service allowed by a service-level objective over its measurement window before the objective is exhausted.
Why does Error Budget matter?
It gives reliability and product work a shared decision boundary: teams can spend remaining budget on change while slowing risk when user-visible failure consumes it.
Error Budget in practice
Derive the budget from the SLO, track burn by cause and user segment, define release actions before exhaustion, and avoid resetting the accounting after an incident.
What is the common confusion about Error Budget?
An error budget is not a quota for causing incidents. It is an operating policy derived from a user-facing reliability target.
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Related terms
- Service Level Objective (SLO)A target range or threshold for a service-level indicator over a stated population and measurement window.
- Service Level Indicator (SLI)A quantitative measure of service behavior at a defined user-relevant boundary, such as successful request ratio or latency below a…
- AvailabilityThe proportion of eligible service interactions or time windows in which users can obtain the defined acceptable service under a stated…
- Incident ResponseThe coordinated process for detecting, analyzing, containing, recovering from, communicating, and learning from an event that threatens…
- Retry BudgetA bound on retry traffic, usually expressed relative to original requests or over a time window, that prevents retries from consuming…
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