error-budget-review

name	error-budget-review
enabled	true
description	Use when performing error budget review — guides teams through a structured review of their error budget consumption against defined SLOs. This template helps SRE teams assess reliability performance, identify budget burn patterns, and make data-driven decisions about feature velocity versus reliability investment.
required_connections	[{"prefix":"monitoring","label":"Monitoring Platform"},{"prefix":"slo-tracker","label":"SLO Tracking Tool"}]
config_fields	[{"key":"service_name","label":"Service Name","required":true,"placeholder":"e.g., checkout-api"},{"key":"review_window","label":"Review Window","required":true,"placeholder":"e.g., 30 days"},{"key":"slo_target","label":"SLO Target (%)","required":true,"placeholder":"e.g., 99.9"}]
features	["SLO_MANAGEMENT","ERROR_BUDGET","SRE_OPS"]

Error Budget Review

Phase 1: Budget Status Assessment

Gather current error budget data for the review window.

1. Record SLO and error budget status:

   • Current SLO target: ___%
   • Error budget total (minutes of allowed downtime): ___
   • Error budget consumed: ___%
   • Error budget remaining: ___%
   • Days remaining in the window: ___

2. Burn rate analysis:

   • Current burn rate (budget consumed per day): ___
   • Projected budget at end of window: ___%
   • Is the current burn rate sustainable? Y/N

Phase 2: Incident and Degradation Review

Catalog events that consumed error budget.

Date	Event Description	Duration (min)	Budget Consumed (%)	Root Cause Category	Preventable?

Root Cause Categories: Infrastructure, Deployment, Dependency, Configuration, Capacity, Unknown

Phase 3: Budget Burn Decision Matrix

Budget Status	Action
>50% remaining	Continue normal feature velocity. No restrictions.
25-50% remaining	Increase review rigor. Require rollback plans for all deployments.
10-25% remaining	Reduce deployment frequency. Prioritize reliability work.
<10% remaining	Feature freeze. All engineering effort on reliability.
Exhausted	Full freeze. Escalate to leadership. Conduct postmortem on budget exhaustion.

Phase 4: Trend Analysis

• Compare budget consumption to previous 3 review windows
• Identify recurring root cause categories
• Assess whether SLO targets are appropriately set
• Evaluate if measurement methodology is accurate

Phase 5: Recommendations

1. For each top budget consumer:
   • Define preventive action
   • Assign owner
   • Set target completion date
   • Define expected budget impact

Counter-Rationalizations

Shortcut	Counter	Why
"We can skip some steps for this case"	Adapt the workflow steps, don't skip them	Skipped steps are where incidents and oversights originate
"The user seems to already know what to do"	Complete all workflow phases with the user	The workflow catches blind spots that experience alone misses
"This is a minor case, full process is overkill"	Scale the process down, don't turn it off	Minor cases become major when unstructured; the process scales, not disappears
"I'll fill in the details later"	Complete each section before moving on	Deferred details are forgotten; real-time capture is more accurate
"The template output isn't necessary"	Always produce the structured output format	Structured output enables comparison, audit trails, and handoff to other teams

Output Format

Summary

• SLO: ___% over ___ day window
• Error budget status: ___% consumed / ___% remaining
• Burn rate assessment: Sustainable / At Risk / Critical
• Top budget consumer: ___ (___% of total consumption)

Action Items

• Update SLO documentation if targets are being adjusted
• File reliability improvement tickets for top 3 budget consumers
• Communicate budget status to stakeholders
• Schedule follow-up review in ___ days