Burn Rate Alerts That Protect Uptime
Design burn alerts that wake you up only when needed.
By Alex KimHead of Reliability•Published November 15, 2025•5 min read
Two speeds of alert
Use fast burn for sudden failures and slow burn for creeping risk.
Send both to a small rotation plus a product sponsor.
Attach runbooks
Include clear rollback or feature flag steps with every alert.
Log burn reasons to improve forecasts.
Alert ingredients
- SLI referenced
- Current budget left
- Next escalation time
Show context
Display burn rate on status pages during public incidents.
Pause deploys when burn exceeds threshold until SLOs recover.
Burn alerts should be rarer than error alerts but carry more authority.
Article stats
- Author: Alex Kim
- Role: Head of Reliability
- Published: November 15, 2025
- Reading time: 5 min
Tags
#burn rate#error budgets#slo alerts
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