Error Budget

Definition: What Is an Error Budget?

An error budget is a predefined allowance or limit for acceptable errors or failures within a system or process. It represents the tolerance for mistakes, bugs, or downtime that can occur before the user experience or overall system reliability is compromised. By setting an error budget, teams can prioritize their efforts, balance innovation with stability, and make informed decisions on where to invest resources to minimize errors and improve overall system performance.

Error budget is typically used in the context of Service Level Objectives, where the error budget is calculated as `100% – SLO value`. For example, the screenshot below is from Sematext SLO monitoring and shows how the error budget of 5% is calculated based on the objective that availability (which is an SLI) be 100%.

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