Burn-rate alert planner
Plan alerts that fire when your error budget burns too fast, with the burn rate, error-rate threshold and time to exhaustion for each.
How it works
Each alert says: page me if this share of the budget is spent within this window. The burn rate is how many times faster than allowed the budget is being spent.
Pairing a long window with a short one (one twelfth as long) means an alert needs a sustained problem to fire, and clears quickly once it stops.
burn rate = budget spent × window ÷ long window
error rate = burn rate × (1 − target)Questions
How many alerts should I have?
Two pages for fast and medium burns, and one ticket for a slow burn, covers most services.
Why not alert on the error rate directly?
A fixed error-rate alert ignores how much budget is left and pages for blips. Burn rate ties the alert to what you promised.