SRE Error Budgets & SLI/SLO Management 2

Question 1

An error budget has been fully consumed three weeks before the end of the quarter. What is the MOST appropriate response?

Accepted Answer

Freeze all non-critical feature releases and focus on reliability work

Answer

Increase the SLO target to automatically replenish the error budget

Answer

Ignore the depletion since SLOs reset at the start of the next quarter

Answer

Reduce monitoring frequency to lower the number of detected incidents

Question 2

Which formula correctly expresses the error budget for a 99.9% monthly SLO?

Accepted Answer

0.1% of total minutes in the month ≈ 43.8 minutes of allowed downtime

Answer

1.0% of total minutes in the month ≈ 438 minutes of allowed downtime

Answer

0.01% of total minutes in the month ≈ 4.38 minutes of allowed downtime

Answer

99.9% of total minutes in the month ≈ 43,756 minutes of allowed downtime

Question 3

A team defines a latency SLI as 'the proportion of homepage requests served in under 200 ms.' Which SLO statement is BEST aligned with this SLI?

Accepted Answer

99% of homepage requests will be served in under 200 ms over a rolling 28-day window

Answer

Homepage average latency will not exceed 200 ms per calendar month

Answer

Homepage p99 latency will not exceed 200 ms as measured at the load balancer

Answer

Homepage requests will succeed 99.9% of the time within a 30-day window

Question 4

What is the PRIMARY risk of setting SLO targets that are too high (e.g., 99.999%)?

Accepted Answer

The error budget becomes so small that even minor incidents exhaust it, blocking all feature development

Answer

Customers will always expect more than 99.999% reliability in future contracts

Answer

Monitoring systems cannot accurately measure reliability at that level

Answer

Engineering teams will have too much free time since incidents are rare

Question 5

A service has two SLIs: availability (target 99.5%) and latency (target 95% of requests under 300 ms). Error budgets are tracked independently. Which statement is TRUE?

Accepted Answer

Exhausting the latency error budget can block releases even if the availability budget still has headroom

Answer

Only the availability SLO matters for release decisions; latency is advisory

Answer

Both budgets must be combined into a single composite error budget before making release decisions

Answer

Latency SLOs are not measurable as error budgets because latency is a continuous variable

Question 6

Which technique is MOST effective for reducing measurement noise when calculating SLI compliance for a high-traffic API?

Accepted Answer

Use a rolling time window and exclude requests during planned maintenance windows

Answer

Sample only the first 1,000 requests per hour to keep data volumes manageable

Answer

Calculate SLI compliance based on the slowest 1% of requests only

Answer

Average SLI values across all data centers before comparing to the SLO target