Interactive tool
What an availability target actually allows
“Three nines” is abstract; 43 minutes a month is not. This converts a target into a budget, then shows the burn rate — because spending half your budget in a tenth of the window is a very different situation from spending it evenly.
Runs in your browser · nothing is sent anywhere
Target
43,200 minutes total
Needed for burn rate — spending half the budget in a tenth of the window is very different from spending it evenly.
✓ within budget
- Total budget
- 43 minutes
- Remaining
- 25 minutes
- Burn rate
- 0.83×
Within budget at 0.83× the sustainable rate. Spending budget is not failure — an unspent budget usually means you are shipping too cautiously.
An error budget converts “how reliable should we be” into “how much unavailability may we spend”, which is a decision engineers and product owners can share. A budget that is never spent usually means you are shipping too cautiously, not that things are going well.
Did this get you to an answer?
No text box on purpose — please do not paste production logs anywhere