SLA vs SLO vs Error Budget
Understand contractual SLAs, operational SLO targets and duration-based error budgets with worked examples.
Login2Cloud product team · Published 2026-10-01
Three related ideas
An SLA is an agreement with defined terms and remedies. An SLO is a measurable reliability target for a stated service and window. An error budget is the amount of unreliability the target permits. A monitoring report is evidence, not a new contractual guarantee.
Calculate a duration budget
For a fully eligible 30-day window, there are 43,200 minutes. A 99.9% SLO allows 43.2 minutes of downtime. If observed downtime is 12 minutes, consumed budget is about 27.78% and 31.2 minutes remain. If actual downtime exceeds 43.2 minutes, the target is breached. Login2Cloud floors remaining budget at zero and reports the overrun separately.
Define exclusions and coverage
Maintenance, paused monitors and unknown history change what the measurement establishes. Login2Cloud reports these semantics and coverage explicitly. Do not turn an unobserved week into 100% availability or compare different exclusions as equivalent.
Use reports in a review
Compare incident durations, MTTR and SLO attainment with an equivalent period. Calendar comparisons follow the workspace timezone. Budget consumption reflects observed history; it is not a prediction that an outage will happen.
Common questions
Where should I start?
Use the related tool to inspect the current signal, then configure the matching monitor and verify its first result.