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Calcrivo

SLI Calculator

Calculate a Service Level Indicator from good and total events over a measurement window, and compare it against your SLO target.

Inputs

events

Count of events that met the success criteria (e.g. requests under latency threshold, non-5xx responses).

events

Total number of valid events measured in the window.

days

Rolling window over which the SLI is measured (commonly 28 or 30 days).

%

The Service Level Objective you're measuring against.

SLI (Service Level Indicator)

99.8500%

Meets SLO Target

false

Error Budget Consumed

150.0%

Bad Events

1,500

Margin vs SLO (pp)

-0.0500

Step by step

  1. SLI: good / total × 100

    998,500 / 1,000,000 × 100

    = 99.8500%

  2. Bad events

    1,000,000 − 998,500

    = 1,500

  3. Error budget (events allowed to fail)

    1,000,000 × (1 − 99.9/100)

    = 1000 events

  4. Error budget consumed

    1,500 / 1000 × 100

    = 150.0%

How it works

An SLI (Service Level Indicator) is the measured proportion of 'good' events out of all valid events in a window — for example, requests served under a latency threshold, or responses that weren't a server error. Formula: SLI = good_events / total_events × 100. Comparing the SLI to your SLO (Service Level Objective) target tells you whether you're in compliance, and the gap between the two — expressed as error budget — tells you how much unreliability you can still afford before breaching the SLO.

Formulas

Service Level Indicator

SLI = (good_events / total_events) × 100

good_events
Count of events meeting success criteria
total_events
Total valid events in the measurement window

Error budget consumed

error_budget_consumed_% = bad_events / (total_events × (1 - SLO_target / 100)) × 100

bad_events
total_events - good_events
total_events
Total valid events
SLO_target
Service Level Objective target percentage

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between SLI, SLO and SLA?

The SLI is the raw measurement (e.g. 99.95% success rate). The SLO is your internal target for that SLI (e.g. 99.9%). The SLA is the externally communicated commitment, usually with contractual consequences, and is often set looser than the SLO to leave margin.

What counts as a 'good event'?

It depends on the SLI type: for availability, a good event is a non-error response; for latency, it's a request under your threshold; for correctness, it's a response with the expected result. Define it precisely so measurement is consistent.

How is error budget useful day-to-day?

Error budget converts an abstract percentage into a concrete number of allowed failures. Once it's exhausted, many SRE practices pause risky releases and prioritize reliability work until the budget resets in the next window.

Why measure over a rolling window instead of calendar month?

A rolling window (e.g. trailing 28 days) gives a consistent, continuously updated view of reliability without discontinuities at month boundaries, which is why most SRE tooling defaults to it.

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