SLO and Error Budget Skill

Produce a complete, implementable SLO document for a service — covering what to measure, what target to set, how to calculate the error budget, and what to do when it burns.

A good SLO is not a target to hit. It is an agreement about what reliability means for your users — and a framework for making principled trade-offs between reliability and velocity.

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not already provided:

• Service name and brief description of what it does
• Primary users — who depends on this service and how
• User-facing interactions to protect — e.g. API calls, page loads, transactions
• Current reliability data — error rate, latency, uptime (last 30–90 days if available)
• Existing on-call setup — who responds to alerts?
• Deployment frequency — how often does the team ship?
• Any existing SLAs with customers — these constrain SLO targets

Key Definitions