Question

A payments service reports 99.95% availability against its SLO, and the error budget shows healthy headroom for the quarter. However, the support team is fielding a steady stream of user complaints about failed checkout attempts, and executives are frustrated that the SLI dashboards look green while customers are clearly unhappy. As the SRE reviewing this discrepancy, what is the most appropriate first action?

Accepted Answer

Investigate whether the current SLI is measuring the right 'good events' from the user's perspective, since the metric may exclude the failure mode users are experiencing.

Answer

Tighten the SLO target to 99.99% so the dashboards will more accurately reflect customer dissatisfaction.

Answer

Declare a feature freeze immediately because the volume of complaints indicates the error budget must be exhausted.

Answer

Increase the alerting sensitivity on the existing SLI so on-call engineers are paged more often during the quarter.