Service Level Objectives and Error Budgets Questions

Comprehensive coverage of Service Level Indicators, Service Level Objectives, Service Level Agreements, and error budgets, covering both conceptual foundations and practical operationalization. Candidates should be able to define each construct, explain how to select and instrument meaningful indicators such as availability, latency percentiles, throughput, and error rate, and choose appropriate measurement windows and targets. Expect to compute error budgets from objective targets, convert objective percentages into allowed downtime or error time over observation windows, calculate burn and burn rate, and describe how error budget policies gate releases, influence rollback and mitigation decisions, and drive prioritization between feature work and reliability work. Topics include monitoring and alerting design aligned to objectives, distinguishing noisy symptomatic alerts from objective driven alerts, dashboarding and real time tracking, observability and instrumentation considerations, progressive delivery patterns such as canary deployments and feature flags to protect an error budget, and on call and incident response practices including blameless post incident review and SLO adjustments. At senior levels be prepared to discuss trade offs between reliability and velocity, aligning infrastructure investment with objective targets, governance and policy across multiple teams and dependent services, handling seasonality and edge cases, and metrics design to avoid gaming or misinterpretation while translating objectives into actionable runbooks and organizational policies.