Practice Test Geeks(SRE) Site Reliability Engineering Foundation Certification Practice Test
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Error Budgets & SLI/SLO Management Flashcards

6 cards from real SRE practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.

Read the first 6 Error Budgets & SLI/SLO Management flashcards as text

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

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

    When the error budget is exhausted, the standard SRE practice is to halt feature work and redirect engineering effort toward reliability improvements until the budget recovers.

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

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

    Error budget = (1 − SLO) × measurement window. For 99.9% over ~43,800 minutes/month: 0.001 × 43,800 ≈ 43.8 minutes.

  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?

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

    An SLO must reference the same SLI metric and unit. The SLI is the proportion of requests under 200 ms, so the SLO should set a target percentage for that same proportion over a defined time window.

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

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

    An extremely tight SLO leaves almost no error budget, meaning even routine deployments or brief incidents will exhaust the budget and force a reliability freeze on feature work.

  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?

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

    Each SLO has its own independent error budget. If any budget is exhausted, that dimension of reliability is at risk and release decisions should consider halting risky changes regardless of other budgets.

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

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

    Rolling windows smooth out short spikes and planned maintenance exclusions prevent scheduled work from artificially consuming error budget, both of which reduce measurement noise.