Error budget
The allowable amount of downtime or errors within a given period based on your SLA. At 99.97% uptime, the monthly error budget is ~13 minutes. When the budget is depleted, reliability work takes priority over new features.
Expert insight
An error budget only works as a decision-making tool if the team actually treats a spent budget as a real constraint, stopping new automation rollouts until reliability recovers, an error budget that's tracked but never actually changes behavior once it's exhausted is a dashboard metric, not the risk-management tool it's meant to be.
In a real workflow
With a target of 99.9% success, about one failure in a thousand runs is accepted before changes are paused.
Common mistakes
- Budgets nobody tracks.
- Ignoring user impact.
Complexity level
Technical term used in production automation systems.
Related terms
See it in action
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