What Is a Burn Rate Alert?

A burn rate alert is triggered by how fast a service is spending its error budget relative to the rate that would exhaust it over the SLO window. A burn rate above one means the budget is depleting faster than the period allows. Alerting on burn rate warns of an emerging breach early, rather than only after the budget is gone.

Why it matters

Alerting on a raw error threshold either pages too often or too late. Burn rate ties the alert to the SLO budget, so the page reflects real risk to the objective.

Related guides