Set realistic budgets
Start with historic uptime, your current staffing, and customer promises. Tighten gradually instead of jumping to an aspirational number you cannot defend.
Use separate budgets per customer tier and per critical journey. Checkout deserves a stricter target than analytics exports; document why each SLO exists.
Define what counts against the budget (customer-visible failures) versus noise (synthetics in a paused region, planned maintenance).
Alert on burn, not just breaches
Trigger burn rate alerts when budgets drain faster than plan. Pair a fast-burn alert for sudden failures with a slow-burn alert for creeping degradations.
Route burn alerts to both engineers and product owners so risk decisions consider customer and roadmap impact.
Link burn alerts to a clear policy: freeze deploys, roll back, or switch traffic when specific thresholds are crossed.
Burn guardrails
- 4-hour fast burn alert with rollback instructions
- 24-hour slow burn alert with mitigation checklist
- Release freeze policy at 50% burn remaining
Communicate trade offs
Show budget status on dashboards, in sprint reviews, and in status updates during incidents so everyone knows the stakes.
Reopen deploys only after budgets recover and success metrics stay green for a defined window. If you override, log who approved and why.
Tell customers how you're investing budget: resilience work, performance wins, or a feature freeze to rebuild trust.
Review and recalibrate
Quarterly, check if SLOs still match customer expectations and architecture reality. Adjust SLIs if your product shifts or if third-party risk grows.
Capture how much budget gets "spent" by maintenance vs. unplanned work so you can size capacity and staffing correctly.