Glossary · Reliability & operations
Error Budget
The amount of unsuccessful service allowed by a service-level objective over its measurement window before the objective is exhausted.
Why it matters
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.
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.
Common confusion
An error budget is not a quota for causing incidents. It is an operating policy derived from a user-facing reliability target.
Related terms
Sources
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