This PCDOE practice question tests your understanding of managing service incidents. Read the scenario carefully and evaluate each option against the stated constraints before committing to an answer. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A company uses Error Budgets for their service. The SLO is 99.9% availability over a 30-day window. The service has been down for 30 minutes in the current window. What is the remaining error budget?
43.2 minutes
Why wrong: 43.2 minutes is the total budget, not remaining.
60 minutes
Why wrong: 60 minutes would be for 99.9% over 60 days.
13.2 minutes
Calculation: 0.001 * 43200 minutes = 43.2 minutes budget, minus 30 = 13.2.
30 minutes
Why wrong: 30 minutes is downtime used, not remaining.
Answer choices
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
13.2 minutes
The SLO of 99.9% over a 30-day window allows a total error budget of 43.2 minutes (30 days × 24 hours × 60 minutes × 0.001). The service has already consumed 30 minutes of downtime, so the remaining error budget is 43.2 - 30 = 13.2 minutes. Option C is correct because it reflects this precise calculation.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
43.2 minutes
Why it's wrong here
43.2 minutes is the total budget, not remaining.
60 minutes
Why it's wrong here
60 minutes would be for 99.9% over 60 days.
13.2 minutes
Why this is correct
Calculation: 0.001 * 43200 minutes = 43.2 minutes budget, minus 30 = 13.2.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
30 minutes
Why it's wrong here
30 minutes is downtime used, not remaining.
Common exam traps
Google Cloud often tests the distinction between total error budget and remaining error budget, trapping candidates who forget to subtract the already consumed downtime from the total allowable downtime.
Detailed technical explanation
The error budget is derived from the SLO as the maximum allowable downtime over the measurement window: for a 30-day window (43,200 minutes), 99.9% availability permits 0.1% downtime, which is exactly 43.2 minutes. In practice, teams monitor error budget burn rate to trigger alerts before the budget is exhausted, and the remaining budget is continuously recalculated as new incidents occur. A common real-world scenario is that if the service exceeds the error budget, the team must halt feature releases until the budget is replenished in the next window.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
An e-commerce site experiences heavy traffic on Black Friday and near-zero traffic during off-peak weeks. Rather than provisioning permanent large VMs, the team uses auto-scaling groups that add capacity automatically under load and reduce it overnight. Questions like this test whether you understand elasticity, availability zones, and cloud compute scaling patterns.
What to study next
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FAQ
Managing service incidents — This question tests Managing service incidents — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
The correct answer is: 13.2 minutes — The SLO of 99.9% over a 30-day window allows a total error budget of 43.2 minutes (30 days × 24 hours × 60 minutes × 0.001). The service has already consumed 30 minutes of downtime, so the remaining error budget is 43.2 - 30 = 13.2 minutes. Option C is correct because it reflects this precise calculation.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Last reviewed: Jun 30, 2026
This PCDOE 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 PCDOE exam.
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