Latency Budget Calculator
Input your services and SLO targets to get per-service latency budgets. Supports sequential and parallel service architectures.
SLO Target
SLO target must be greater than 0 to calculate budgets.
Services
| Service Name | Avg Latency (ms) | Type | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
Budget Allocation
| Service | Current Latency | Budget (ms) | Budget (%) | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Within budget Over budget | ||||
| Total | 100% | OK Over SLO |
Budget Distribution
Calculation Method
Budget_service = SLO_total x (latency_service / effective_total)
Each service receives a portion of the total SLO budget proportional to its average latency. Services that take longer get a larger portion of the budget.
Parallel services: For parallel services, the effective latency contribution is max(parallel group), not the sum. The budget for the entire parallel group equals the budget that would be allocated to a single service with the max latency.
This calculator uses the percentile target. In practice, P99 latency is typically 2-5x higher than P50 latency. Plan your budgets at the percentile that matches your SLO.
Per-Service Calculation
How Latency Budgets Work
In a distributed system, every request passes through multiple services. Each service adds latency to the overall response time. A latency budget allocates a portion of your total SLO target to each service, ensuring the combined latency stays within your objective.
Why per-service budgets matter: Without individual service budgets, teams optimize in isolation. A team might celebrate reducing their service latency from 50ms to 40ms while another service balloons from 30ms to 80ms. Per-service budgets make ownership clear and SLO compliance measurable at the service level.
Sequential vs. parallel services: In a sequential architecture (A then B then C), total latency is the sum of all services. In a parallel architecture (B and C run simultaneously after A), total latency is A + max(B, C). The calculator accounts for this difference when allocating budgets. Parallel services share a time window, so the bottleneck is the slowest service in the group.
Learn how TraceKit helps you measure actual per-service latency in production -- see the tracing guide.
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