Error Budgets for Uptime Teams
Use error budgets to balance uptime risk and feature velocity.
By Casey MartinezIncident Commander•Published November 15, 2025•5 min read
Set realistic budgets
Start with historic uptime and tighten gradually.
Use separate budgets per customer tier.
Alert on burn, not just breaches
Trigger burn rate alerts when budgets drain faster than plan.
Route burn alerts to both engineers and product owners.
Burn guardrails
- 4 hour fast burn alert
- 24 hour slow burn alert
- Release freeze policy at 50% burn
Communicate trade offs
Show budget status on dashboards and in status updates during incidents.
Reopen deploys only after budgets recover.
Budgets keep uptime sustainable without halting roadmap forever.
Article stats
- Author: Casey Martinez
- Role: Incident Commander
- Published: November 15, 2025
- Reading time: 5 min
Tags
#error budgets#slo#uptime
Related reading
Put this into practice
Deploy monitors, share beautiful status pages, and automate incident narratives with Watch Dog.
Start for free