A global SaaS enterprise processes real-time financial reconciliations on Google Cloud. Business stakeholders have determined that transaction processing latencies exceeding 5 seconds lead to immediate contractual SLA financial penalties and customer churn. Conversely, brief total availability outages under 30 seconds are mitigated by client-side retries and carry minimal business impact. The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team must configure observability and reliability metrics that accurately reflect these business priorities.
Which TWO architectural and operational strategy decisions should the SRE team implement to align technical metrics with business impact? (Select 2 answers.)
- Define the Service Level Indicator (SLI) as the proportion of valid transaction requests completed within 5 seconds, establishing an SLO target that limits error budget consumption based on acceptable financial penalty exposure.Answer
- Configure operational alerting based on multi-window, multi-burn-rate error budget consumption rather than single-window static latency threshold breaches.Answer
- CDefine the primary Service Level Indicator (SLI) as the proportion of HTTP 200 OK response codes to total requests, establishing a 99.99% availability SLO target.
- DConfigure static threshold alerts to trigger immediate PagerDuty incident escalation whenever latency exceeds 5 seconds during any single 1-minute monitoring window.
Answer
The SRE team should define the SLI based on the proportion of requests completed within the 5-second business threshold and configure alerting based on multi-window error budget burn rates.
Aligning technical objectives with business outcomes requires measuring the exact condition that causes business loss (latencies exceeding 5 seconds) as the SLI and protecting the error budget using multi-window burn rate alerts to prevent unnecessary engineer paging on brief non-impacting events.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
Aligning SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budget Alerting with Business Penalties and User Impact