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name: error-budget-management description: Advises on SLOs, error budget burn, and release trade-offs such as feature freezes or reliability sprints. Use when balancing velocity against reliability targets.

Error budget management

Purpose

Connect product delivery decisions to SLOs and error budgets with numeric burn, remaining budget, and explicit trade-offs—not generic "be more reliable" advice.

When to Use

• User asks about error budget, SLO burn, release freeze, or reliability vs features.
• Post-incident policy on shipping during elevated risk.
• Planning sprint focus when observability data shows fast burn.

When NOT to Use

• Raw dashboard queries → grafana, datadog, cloudwatch.
• Writing the postmortem → postmortem-authoring.
• Defining SLO implementations from scratch → monitor-slos.

Expected Outcome

• Short recommendation with SLO, burn rate, budget remaining, and suggested policy (freeze, slow down, or invest).
• Explicit tradeoffs for product and engineering leads.

Inputs to Gather

• SLO definitions and measurement window (30d rolling, etc.).
• Current burn rate and incidents in period.
• Upcoming releases and risk profile.
• Organizational policy on exhausted budgets.

Workflow

1. Pull SLO/error budget signals from user or observability tools.
2. State SLO target, current SLI, and budget consumed/remaining.
3. Compare burn to policy thresholds.
4. Recommend freeze, reduced risk releases, reliability sprint, or safe feature investment.
5. Document assumptions if data is incomplete.

Domain guidance

Tie product pace to reliability objectives.

• State SLO and current burn; compare to budget remaining.
• If budget is exhausted or burning fast: recommend feature freeze, reduced risk releases, or reliability sprint.
• If budget is healthy: note where to safely re-invest (debt, features).

Output: short recommendation with numbers and explicit tradeoffs.

Tool Availability Rules

Access	Behavior
Full tool access	Use metrics/SLO tools for live burn calculations.
Read-only	Compute from user-supplied numbers; show formula.
No data	Ask for SLO, SLI, and window; do not invent burn rates.

Related tool sets

• jira
• github

Review / Decision / Execution Criteria

• Numbers must be sourced or labeled as estimates.
• Recommendations proportional to burn severity.
• Align with blameless culture—policy, not blame.

Output Format

1. SLO/SLI snapshot.
2. Budget status (remaining %, burn rate).
3. Recommendation (ship / slow / freeze / invest).
4. Tradeoffs and assumptions.

Quality Bar

• Exec-readable in under one screen.
• Actionable policy guidance.

Safety and Boundaries

• Do not fabricate SLO metrics.
• Do not mandate production changes without stakeholder alignment.

Escalation / Dispatch Rules

• Metric proof → observability skills.
• Incident narrative → postmortem-authoring.

References

• skills/old_skills.json (error-budget-management).
• skills/skill.instruction.md, skills/meta.instructions.md