MODULE: SERIAL DEPENDENCY ERROR-BUDGET BENCHHEDGED FORMULA: p_eff = 1 - (1 - p)^2

Compound Serial Multi-Agent SLA Calculator

Why do agent workflows feel flaky in production even when each upstream vendor advertises 99.5% uptime? Because sequential unhedged calls multiply failure probabilities. Use the interactive bench and decay table below before signing enterprise customer SLAs.

UNHEDGED: R = p^n30-DAY WINDOW: 43,800 MINTARGET FLOOR: >= 99.0%

Analytics display charting system response times and error-budget curves

ERROR-BUDGET CURVEP95 LATENCY

Serial Multi-Agent Compound SLA Calculator

An autonomous workflow that chains sequential LLM reasoning steps, vector lookups, MCP tool servers, and sandboxed code execution succeeds only when every unhedged serial hop succeeds (R = p^n).

Sequential unhedged agent & tool hops (n)6 hops

Example 6-hop chain: Router LLM → Vector DB → Planner LLM → OAuth MCP Tool → Sandbox Runner → Summariser LLM.

Average per-dependency availability (p)99.50%

Simulate Multi-Provider Circuit-Breaker Fallback: Automatically route around HTTP 429/503 errors to a secondary model/region (p_hedged = 1 - (1 - p)^2).

Compound Pipeline SLA

97.037%

Implied Monthly Downtime

21.6 hrs

Expected Failed Agent Runs per 10,000 Invocations

0 failed runs / 10,000

Warning: Below 99.0% composite availability. Add idempotency keys, bounded exponential backoff, and cross-provider model routing before exposing this workflow to customer SLAs.

Quick Reference: Serial Hop Availability Decay (Unhedged)

Workflow Depth (n)	At 99.0% / hop	At 99.5% / hop	At 99.9% / hop	Implied Downtime (at 99.5%)
1 hop (Single prompt)	99.00%	99.50%	99.90%	3.6 hrs / mo
3 hops (RAG + Rerank + Answer)	97.03%	98.51%	99.70%	10.9 hrs / mo
6 hops (Plan + 3 Tools + Verify + Answer)	94.15%	97.04%	99.40%	21.6 hrs / mo
10 hops (Deep multi-step workflow)	90.44%	95.11%	99.00%	35.7 hrs / mo
15 hops (Autonomous coding loop)	86.01%	92.76%	98.51%	52.9 hrs / mo

Reviewed by Nadia Lindqvist, Lead Reliability & Agent Systems Editor

Reviews distributed-systems SLA models and multi-provider failover patterns.

Last reviewed: 2026-11-01

Reviewed every 3 months

AI-assistance & editorial check: Research outlining and formatting are assisted by AI tools in an offline draft workflow. Nothing on this site publishes automatically without verification. A named human editor opens and verifies every primary source link, command snippet, and factual statement prior to publication. See our Editorial Policy and Corrections Policy.

Verified Primary Sources

AWS Well-Architected Reliability Pillar: Calculating Availability of Hard Dependencies (Amazon Web Services Documentation, Series vs Redundant Components)

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