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Service Mesh Health Score Calculator

Generate an overall health score for a service mesh from latency, errors and mTLS coverage.

About Service Mesh Health Score Calculator

This composite score combines four signals into a single mesh health indicator: success rate and error budget consumption (each 30% weight, since they're the clearest outcome measures of user-facing reliability), and p99 latency-vs-target and sidecar fleet health (each 20% weight, as supporting operational signals). Categories — Excellent (90+), Healthy (75-89), Degraded (50-74), Critical (under 50) — give an at-a-glance read on whether the mesh needs operational attention.

Formula

health_score = success_rate_score × 0.35 + latency_score × 0.25 + error_budget_score × 0.20 + mtls_coverage_score × 0.20

success_rate_score
Service success rate normalized to 0-100
latency_score
p99 latency score (lower is better, normalized)
error_budget_score
Remaining error budget normalized to 0-100
mtls_coverage_score
Percent of traffic covered by mTLS

Worked example

With the default values below, Service Mesh Health Score Calculator returns Service Mesh Health Score of 83.3. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.

Inputs used

Success Rateaccepts 0–100 %
99.5 %
P99 Latencyaccepts 0–1,000,000 ms
180 ms
P99 Latency Targetaccepts 1–1,000,000 ms
250 ms
Error Budget Consumedaccepts 0–500 %
30 %
Sidecar Healthy %accepts 0–100 %
98 %

Results

Service Mesh Health Score
83.3 / 100
Health Category
Healthy
Success Rate Score
99.5 / 100
Latency Score
64.0 / 100
Error Budget Score
70.0 / 100
Sidecar Health Score
98.0 / 100

Step by step

  1. 1Latency score: (1 − p99/target) × 50 + 50, clamped= 64.0
  2. 2Error budget score: 100 − consumed%= 70.0
  3. 3Composite: weighted sum of 4 sub-scores= 83.3

Assumptions and limits

  • The result is derived only from the 5 inputs listed above. Anything not among them is not part of the calculation.
  • In particular, this calculator does not take inflation, tax or fees or charges into account.
  • Figures are rounded for display to 1 decimal place, so totals built from several rounded parts can differ slightly from the unrounded arithmetic.

How these calculators are built and tested is described on the Methodology page. If a figure looks wrong, please report it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why weight error budget consumption as heavily as success rate?

Success rate is a point-in-time snapshot, while error budget consumption reflects trend — a mesh with a currently-fine success rate but a rapidly depleting error budget is heading toward an SLO breach, so weighting both equally catches problems earlier than success rate alone.

How is the latency score calculated when p99 exceeds the target?

The score formula (1 − p99/target) × 50 + 50 drops below 50 once p99 exceeds target, and is clamped to 0 at 2x the target latency or worse — this rewards headroom below target and penalizes overages progressively rather than as a hard pass/fail cutoff.

What counts as an unhealthy sidecar?

Commonly: sidecars that are crash-looping, have stale/unsynced configuration from the control plane (e.g. Istio's proxy config version mismatch), or are failing their own readiness/liveness probes — any of these compromise the mesh's ability to route and secure traffic correctly through that pod.

Should this score replace dedicated SLO alerting?

No — this composite is meant as a quick operational dashboard summary, not a replacement for dedicated multi-window burn-rate alerting on each underlying metric, which catches fast-developing issues that a periodic composite score snapshot could miss.

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