<b>Q: My SLA is 99.9% and we just had an outage. Are we in trouble?</b>

<b>Q: My SLA is 99.9% and we just had an outage. Are we in trouble?</b>

A: Not necessarily, and the calm way to think about this is an error budget. If you promise 99.9% monthly, you're allowed roughly 43 minutes of downtime that month. That allowance is a budget you can spend, not a line you can never touch.

So the question isn't "did we have an outage," it's "how much budget is left." A 10-minute incident with 33 minutes still in the bank is fine. Burn the whole budget by the 5th and you should freeze risky deploys and stabilize.

This reframes monitoring from panic to planning. Track downtime against the budget continuously, not just at month-end.

Follow-up: track over a rolling 30-day window, not the calendar month, so a bad day doesn't magically reset on the 1st.

Got a question? Drop it in the comments.