Cloud Digital Leader Scaling with Google Cloud operations Practice Question
A company runs a customer-facing web application with a published SLA of 99.95% monthly availability. In the past month, the application experienced two outages: a 12-minute outage and a 7-minute outage. Did the company meet its SLA?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is that candidates mistakenly think any downtime or multiple outages automatically violate an SLA, ignoring the mathematical allowance built into the 99.95% target.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Yes — 99.95% availability in a 30-day month allows approximately 21.6 minutes of downtime; total outage of 19 minutes is within the budget, meaning the SLA was met
The SLA of 99.95% monthly availability permits a maximum downtime of approximately 21.6 minutes in a 30-day month (total minutes in month × (1 - 0.9995) = 43,200 × 0.0005 = 21.6 minutes). The combined outage of 19 minutes (12 + 7) is within this budget, so the SLA was met. This calculation assumes a 30-day month; if the month had 31 days, the allowable downtime would be about 22.3 minutes, still exceeding 19 minutes.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
No — the company missed the SLA because any outage automatically constitutes an SLA breach
Why it's wrong here
A 99.95% availability target does not require the service to be continuously available; it explicitly tolerates up to 21.6 minutes of downtime in a 30-day month. Therefore, an outage is not an automatic contractual breach — only exceeding the allowed downtime budget is. Since the observed 19 minutes of downtime falls below the 21.6-minute threshold, the SLA has been met despite the presence of outages. Treating any outage as a breach would be equivalent to demanding an impossible 100% uptime goal.
- ✓
Yes — 99.95% availability in a 30-day month allows approximately 21.6 minutes of downtime; total outage of 19 minutes is within the budget, meaning the SLA was met
Why this is correct
The math confirms the SLA was met. 30 days × 1,440 minutes = 43,200 minutes. 0.05% × 43,200 = 21.6 minutes allowed. 12 + 7 = 19 minutes actual downtime. 19 < 21.6, so the SLA is met. However, the remaining buffer is only 2.6 minutes — the team should treat this as a reliability concern.
- ✗
The answer cannot be determined without knowing the cause of the outages
Why it's wrong here
SLA compliance is a mathematical comparison between the contracted availability percentage and the total measured downtime during the commitment period; the root cause of an outage does not enter the calculation. Unless the contract specifically excludes certain categories of downtime (for example, scheduled maintenance or customer-caused incidents), any unavailability counts toward the monthly total. Here the total outage duration is known to be 19 minutes, so the SLA has been met regardless of whether the cause was infrastructure failure, a code bug, or an external event.
- ✗
No — two separate outages in one month always constitute an SLA breach regardless of duration
Why it's wrong here
An SLA that specifies 99.95% availability sets a monthly error budget of 21.6 minutes of cumulative downtime; it does not limit the number of discrete incidents. The correct measure is the aggregate duration of all unavailability events, not their frequency. Two short outages whose total is 19 minutes stay within the budget, so they cannot be said to breach the SLA solely because there were two incidents. Counting incidents instead of aggregate downtime would make the percentage-based contract meaningless.
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Key term
SLA
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contract between a service provider and a customer that defines the level of service expected, including metrics like uptime, response time, and penalties for non-compliance.
Key term
Availability
Availability is the measure of how often a system or service is operational and accessible when needed, typically expressed as a percentage of uptime.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This GCDL practice question is part of Courseiva's free Google Cloud certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the GCDL exam.