# 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.

## Related tools

- [SLO & error budget calculator](https://powertraces.com/tools/slo-error-budget)
- [Uptime nines converter](https://powertraces.com/tools/uptime-nines)
- [Composite SLA calculator](https://powertraces.com/tools/composite-sla)
- [Latency percentile calculator](https://powertraces.com/tools/latency-percentiles)

[All tools](https://powertraces.com/tools)