Error Budget Strategies for Performance Management

One of the biggest mistakes in the early literature about using SLOs and error budgets is that so much of it was framed around "halt releases if out of error budget; ship features if you have error budget!" There isn't anything wrong with this, but it severely limits the incredibly usefulness of error budgets! Here are just a few other ways you can use this data: 1. Better alerting. Why get woken up at 03:00 by a threshold alert when your performance over time hasn't yet actually impacted user sentiment? 2. Plan for experimentation and chaos engineering. You probably shouldn't do things that might break things if you're low on error budget. But if you have lots remaining: test away! In fact, I believe adding error budgets to your chaos engineering efforts is a force multiplier for both! They so naturally compliment each other. 3. Time your large-scale production projects. Do you need to perform a full DR test in production? Fail over from one datacenter/cloud region to the next? Turn off legacy backend services that everything used to depend on? Look at your error budgets to see if it makes sense to do that now, or maybe next week (or next month or...) 4. Schedule and better understand your load and stress tests. Without error budgets in place, it can be difficult to understand where on the curve you start to break, and often just where you completely break. Also, maybe don't do those tests when you just had an outage and your budget is depleted or low. 5. Report on your service reliability in a more meaningful way. Much has been said by yours truly and many others about how MTTX measurements are just bad metrics over the last few years. But do you know what good ones are? Your error budgets. They can much more precisely inform you and your stakeholders about the actual impact of your incidents than arbitrary mean measurements ever can. 6. Do nothing at all! Sometimes you know why you ran out of error budget, or conversely you know why your error budget has been perfect. Maybe nothing actually has to happen at all, or you know you need to wait on another team, a vendor, new budget etc. to actually get things back in line. 7. Have better data to have better discussions to make better decisions. That's what it's really all about. I'm not a huge fan of strict error budget policies. Instead, use this data to help you better think about "What is actually going on? How is this impacting user sentiment?" and go from there. What are some other ways you like to use error budgets?

Yes, even Errors have to be on budget! 2 simple metrics you need to know to call your system resilient. You publish your source code into the wild with a promise: it will work most of the time. To make sure your system is reliable, you need to understand: 𝗘𝗿𝗿𝗼𝗿 𝗕𝘂𝗱𝗴𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 Error budgeting defines how much downtime is acceptable over a certain period. Let's say our goal is to be 99.9% uptime, then the allowable downtime can be calculated as follows: SLO = 99.9% uptime Total Time Period = 30 days (43,200 minutes) Allowable Downtime = Total Time * (1 − Uptime %) Allowable Downtime = 43,200 minutes * (1−0.999) So, your system can have a maximum of 43.2 minutes of downtime in 30 days. Knowing your error budget helps you decide when to add new features and when to focus on fixing problems. 𝗠𝗲𝗮𝗻 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 (𝗠𝗧𝗧𝗥) Mean Time to Recovery is the average time to fix a problem and get your system back up and running after an issue occurs.  Let's say: Total Downtime = 240 minutes Number of Incidents = 6 MTTR = Total Downtime / Number of Incidents MTTR = 240 minutes / 6 = 40 minutes So, the average recovery time per incident is 40 minutes. 𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀 • Error Budget -> It's about balancing innovation with system reliability. • MTTR -> How quickly you can bounce back from failures. • Lower MTTR = Higher Resilience! Resilience isn't just dodging failures; it's about planning for them and bouncing back fast.

Error budgets aren’t just for SREs. They’re procurement gold, if you use them right. Most teams treat error budgets like internal scorecards. They burn through them silently, then hold a postmortem no one reads. Then they renew the vendor anyway. That’s a missed opportunity. Because error budgets don’t just track performance. They surface patterns. They show who’s trending toward risk, and who’s hiding behind dashboards. Here are 3 ways we’ve turned error budgets into real business leverage: 1. Trigger a contract review when burn rates spike. This isn’t about punishment. It’s about accountability. If the vendor can’t stay within the tolerance, it’s time to renegotiate scope, timeline, or cost. 2. Tie compensation to cumulative reliability, not isolated incidents. Bonus multipliers or penalties based on long-term burn signals create shared incentives across engineering, vendor, and product teams. 3. Use error budgets to shape renewal terms. Why renew blindly? Use burn trends to adjust SLAs, investment levels, and feature prioritization. You don’t need perfect uptime. You need clearly defined tolerances and real consequences. Because if you’re still negotiating with dashboards instead of data, you’re not leading. You’re guessing. How are you using burn rate in your next renewal conversation?