SA
SLO and Error Budget
🔵 Stable🕐 updated 2026-08-10
🔷 SkillSpec L3
pm-engineering
Define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and an error budget policy for a service. Use when asked to write SLOs, define SLIs, calculate an error budget, set reliability targets, or create an error budget policy. Produces a complete SLO document with SLI definitions, target calculation, error budget policy, burn rate alerts, and review cadence.
📚 Based on SLOs & error budgets — Google SRE
What to give it
▸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
✅ The bar it holds itself to
Every skill in this library self-verifies — these are this skill's own quality checks, straight from its definition.
✓SLIs are user-facing — they measure what users experience, not internal system metrics
✓Good and bad events are precisely defined — no ambiguity about what counts
✓Targets are based on historical data, not aspirational round numbers
✓Error budget policy has clear triggers and clear actions — not "discuss as a team"
✓Burn rate alerts have different windows to catch both fast burns and slow burns
✓Exclusions are documented so they don't silently inflate the SLO number
⚠️ What it refuses to do
Do not set SLO targets at 100% — this discourages feature development and does not reflect how users experience reliability
Do not measure internal system metrics as SLIs — SLIs must reflect what users directly experience, not internal CPU or memory
Do not write an error budget policy with vague triggers — "discuss as a team" is not an actionable policy; triggers must be specific percentages
Do not base targets on aspirational round numbers — always derive from historical baseline data
Do not configure only one burn-rate alert window — a single window misses both fast burns and slow burns that exhaust the budget quietly
Install
npx pm-claude-skills add --agent claude # or codex · cursor · gemini · hermes
# or one-line MCP (every skill, any client):
claude mcp add pm-skills -- npx -y pm-claude-skills-mcpStart with
Related skills
🔌 Embed this skill
Drop this on your blog, docs, or site — it renders a "Run this skill" card:
<div data-pm-skill="slo-error-budget"></div>
<script src="https://mohitagw15856.github.io/pm-claude-skills/embed.js" async></script>💬 Discussion
SLO and Error Budget is one of 1174 open-source professional AI agent skills — all SkillSpec L3.
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