Error Budget Calculator
Calculate your error budget, burn rate, and exhaustion forecast from SLO targets. Visualize budget consumption and plan reliability trade-offs.
1,000
allowed failures
500
50.0% of budget
500
50.0% of budget
1.00x
1.0x = on track to exhaust at period end
Exhaustion Forecast
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Frequently asked questions
What is an error budget?
An error budget is the maximum amount of unreliability your service can tolerate before violating its SLO. It is calculated as (100% - SLO target). For example, a 99.9% SLO gives you a 0.1% error budget. If you handle 1,000,000 requests in a period, up to 1,000 can fail without breaching the objective.
What is an SLO?
A Service Level Objective (SLO) is an internal reliability target that defines the acceptable level of service quality. Unlike an SLA, which is a contractual commitment with customers, an SLO is used by engineering teams to balance reliability work against feature development.
How do you calculate burn rate?
Burn rate measures how quickly you are consuming your error budget relative to the period length. A burn rate of 1.0 means you will exactly exhaust the budget by the end of the period. A burn rate of 2.0 means you are consuming budget twice as fast and will exhaust it halfway through the period.
What happens when the error budget is exhausted?
When the error budget reaches zero, teams typically freeze feature releases and focus exclusively on reliability improvements. This policy ensures that unreliable services get the engineering attention they need before new changes introduce additional risk.