An SRE team has configured a 99.9% availability SLO on a 28-day rolling window. After two weeks, the Instana SLO dashboard reports the error budget is at 15% remaining. What does this indicate?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation and Infographic
An error budget of 15% remaining means the service has already consumed 85% of the total downtime or failure budget allocated by the SLO for the 28-day window. For a 99.9% target over 28 days, the total error budget is approximately 40 minutes; 85% consumed means roughly 34 minutes of downtime has already occurred. This is a critical warning signal prompting the team to reduce risk and prevent further budget burn before the window ends.
Full explanation below image
Full Explanation
An error budget of 15% remaining means the service has already consumed 85% of the total downtime or failure budget allocated by the SLO for the 28-day window. For a 99.9% target over 28 days, the total error budget is approximately 40 minutes; 85% consumed means roughly 34 minutes of downtime has already occurred. This is a critical warning signal prompting the team to reduce risk and prevent further budget burn before the window ends. The correct answer is 'The service has consumed 85% of its total allowed failure budget for the 28-day period'. The incorrect options — "The service's current error rate is 15% and it is actively failing", 'The SLO compliance rate has dropped to 15%, meaning the SLO target is being violated', 'The service has 15% more downtime allowance than was originally allocated' — are wrong because they do not align with IBM Instana's architecture or recommended practices for this scenario. Understanding this concept is essential for the Domain 1: Operations domain of the IBM Instana Observability certification.