Question 1

What are DORA metrics?

Accepted Answer

DORA metrics are four indicators of software delivery performance: deploy frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and change failure rate. Elite teams deploy multiple times per day with lead time under an hour, MTTR under an hour, and change failure rate under 15%.

Question 2

What is an SLO and how is it different from an SLA?

Accepted Answer

An SLO (Service Level Objective) is an internal target — typically tighter than what you commit to customers. An SLA (Service Level Agreement) is the external commitment, usually with financial penalties for breach. Common pattern: SLA 99.5% public, SLO 99.9% internal, so the buffer absorbs minor incidents without breaching the SLA.

Question 3

What is an error budget?

Accepted Answer

An error budget is the complement of a service level objective. If the SLO is 99.9% availability, the error budget is 0.1% — about 43 minutes of downtime per month. The error budget policy defines what happens as the budget burns down: at 50% burn, freeze risky changes; at 100%, only fixes ship until next period.

Question 4

What is multi-burn-rate alerting?

Accepted Answer

A pattern from the Google SRE workbook. Instead of a single threshold, alert at multiple burn rates with different time windows: 14.4× burn over 1h (high severity), 6× over 6h (medium), 3× over 1d (low). This catches both fast disasters and slow drift without false alarms during minor blips.

Question 5

How often should I review SLOs?

Accepted Answer

Weekly during team sync (5 minutes — are we burning budget faster than expected?), monthly in leadership review (trends across the quarter), quarterly for objective refresh (are these still the right targets given product evolution?).

Quality Goals & SLOs (2026)

DORA Metrics — Targets

SLIs / SLOs

How this template fits with the SRE workbook

Definition of Done

Test Strategy

Incident Postmortem

Release Readiness