Create an SLO burn rate rule

Create an SLO burn rate rule to get alerts when the burn rate is too high over a defined threshold for two different lookback periods: a long period and a short period that is 1/12th of the long period. For example, if your long lookback period is one hour, your short lookback period is five minutes.

Choose which SLO to monitor and then define multiple burn rate windows with appropriate severity. For each period, the burn rate is computed as the error rate divided by the error budget. When the burn rates for both periods surpass the threshold, an alert is triggered. Add actions to raise alerts via services or third-party integrations e.g. mail, Slack, Jira.

To create an SLO burn rate rule:

1. In Observability UI, go to Alerts.

2. Select Manage Rules from the Alerts page, and select Create rule.

3. Enter a Name for your rule, and any optional Tags for more granular reporting (leave blank if unsure).

4. Select SLO burn rate from the Select rule type list.

5. Select the SLO you want to monitor.

6. Define multiple burn rate windows for each Action Group (defaults to 4 windows but you can edit):

   • Lookback (hours): Enter the lookback period for this window. A shorter period equal to 1/12th of this period will be used for faster recovery.
   • Burn rate threshold: Enter a burn rate for this window.
   • Action Group: Select a severity for this window.

7. Define the interval to check the rule e.g. check every 1 minute.

8. (Optional) Set up Actions.

9. Save your rule.

You can extend your rules with actions that interact with third-party systems, write to logs or indices, or send user notifications. You can add an action to a rule at any time. You can create rules without adding actions, and you can also define multiple actions for a single rule.

To add actions to rules, you must first create a connector for that service (for example, an email or external incident management system), which you can then use for different rules, each with their own action frequency.

Action frequency

After you select a connector, you must set the action frequency. You can choose to create a Summary of alerts on each check interval or on a custom interval. For example, you can send email notifications that summarize the new, ongoing, and recovered alerts every twelve hours.

Alternatively, you can set the action frequency to For each alert and specify the conditions each alert must meet for the action to run. For example, you can send an email only when the alert status changes to critical.

With the Run when menu you can choose if an action runs for a specific severity (critical, high, medium, low), or when the alert is recovered. For example, you can add a corresponding action for each severity you want an alert for, and also for when the alert recovers.

Action variables

Use the default notification message or customize it. You can add more context to the message by clicking the Add variable icon and selecting from a list of available variables.

The following variables are specific to this rule type. You can also specify variables common to all rules.

context.alertDetailsUrl

Link to the alert troubleshooting view for further context and details. This will be an empty string if the server.publicBaseUrl is not configured.

context.burnRateThreshold

The burn rate threshold value.

context.longWindow

The window duration with the associated burn rate value.

context.reason

A concise description of the reason for the alert.

context.shortWindow

The window duration with the associated burn rate value.

context.sloId

The SLO unique identifier.

context.sloInstanceId

The SLO instance ID.

context.sloName

The SLO name.

context.timestamp

A timestamp of when the alert was detected.

context.viewInAppUrl

The url to the SLO details page to help with further investigation.

Learn how to view alerts and triage SLO burn rate breaches:

• View alerts
• SLO burn rate breaches