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DevOps & Automation · Advanced

Burn Rate

How fast a service is consuming its error budget relative to the rate that would exactly exhaust it at the end of the SLO window.

Definition

A burn rate of 1 means the budget will be used up exactly at the end of the window; a burn rate of 10 means it will be gone in one tenth of the time. SRE alerting commonly uses multi-window, multi-burn-rate alerts to page on fast burns and ticket on slow burns.

Example

Page if the 1-hour burn rate exceeds 14.4, which would consume 2% of a 30-day budget in one hour.

Exam tip

Burn-rate alerting is preferred over raw threshold alerts because it ties alerts directly to SLO impact.

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