Utilities

Error Budget Calculator

Track SLO burn in real time. See remaining error budget, burn rate vs ideal pace, and projected end-of-period SLO at the current rate.

% target
days
15 of 30 days (50%)
minutes
Healthyburn rate: 0.93× ideal pace

Burn rate is under the ideal pace. Safe to ship features at normal velocity.

Total Error Budget

43m

for the 30-day period

Consumed

20m

46.3% of budget

Remaining

23m

53.7% left

Budget Burn

0%vertical line = ideal pace at 50% elapsed100%

Projected end-of-period

Projected total downtime

40m

if current burn rate continues

Projected actual SLO

99.907%

vs target of 99.9%

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Error Budgets in One Paragraph

An error budget is the operationalized version of an SLO. If your SLO says 99.9% availability over 30 days, you have permission to be unavailable for 0.1% of that time — about 43 minutes. While the budget has room, your team ships features. When the budget runs out, the team’s focus shifts to reliability work until the next period starts. Error budgets remove the political negotiation around "is the system reliable enough to deploy this" and replace it with a number.

Why Burn Rate Matters More Than Absolute Downtime

A 5-minute outage on day 2 of a 30-day period is very different from a 5-minute outage on day 28. The first one signals you may exhaust the budget well before the period ends; the second is no longer recoverable but also not predictive. Burn rate normalizes this: it tells you whether your current consumption pace will get you to the end of the period within budget.

A burn rate of 1.0 means you are spending exactly at the ideal pace. Above 1.0 means you will run out before the period ends. Below 1.0 means you have spare budget. Many mature SRE teams alert primarily on burn rate thresholds rather than absolute downtime.

From Tracking to Automation

Tracking error budget burn is half the battle. The other half is reducing the time it takes to detect, investigate, and resolve the incidents that consume it. Uptimes.ai is an AI SRE agent that produces a root cause report in under three minutes and can execute pre-approved remediations automatically — turning what would have been a 30-minute incident into a sub-minute one. That is the most direct way to extend your error budget.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an error budget?+
An error budget is the maximum amount of unreliability your service is allowed before violating its SLO. For a 99.9% SLO over 30 days, the error budget is 0.1% × 30 days = 43 minutes 12 seconds of allowed downtime. SRE teams use it to balance reliability with feature velocity: when budget remains, ship features; when it is exhausted, freeze deploys and focus on stability.
What is burn rate?+
Burn rate is how fast you are consuming the error budget compared to the ideal pace. A burn rate of 1× means you are exactly on track to spend the full budget by the end of the period. 2× means you will exhaust it in half the time. 0.5× means you are spending half as fast as expected — plenty of headroom. Burn rate is the most useful real-time signal in SRE, more useful than absolute downtime.
What burn rate should trigger an alert?+
Google's SRE workbook recommends multi-window burn rate alerts: a fast-page alert when 1-hour burn rate exceeds 14.4× (would consume 2% of monthly budget in 1 hour) and a slower ticket alert when 6-hour burn rate exceeds 6×. Use our Burn Rate Calculator tool to generate the exact thresholds for your SLO.
Should I freeze deploys when the budget is exhausted?+
It depends on your team's policy, but most SRE-mature orgs do — non-essential feature deploys halt until the next compliance window starts. Critical security fixes and reliability improvements still ship. The point is to make reliability vs velocity tradeoffs explicit and rule-based instead of political.
What if I do not have an SLO yet?+
Start by measuring availability of one critical user journey (e.g., successful login, successful checkout) for a few weeks. Set the SLO slightly below your observed availability so you have a realistic target with some budget. The exact number matters less than the discipline of having one.