Burn-rate Alerts

A burn-rate alert fires when an SLO’s burn rate is too high over both a short and a long window simultaneously. The long window suppresses brief blips; the short window keeps the alert responsive. Both are required to catch real problems without paging on every momentary spike.

Burn-rate alerts live in two places:

• Per SLO, under the SLO detail page’s Burn-rate alerts section — for creating, editing, and deleting alerts.
• Workspace-wide, on the Burn-rate alerts page (/<workspaceId>/slos/alerts) — the on-call surface that lists every burn-rate alert in the workspace, firing-first.

Anatomy of a burn-rate alert

Field	What it does
Name	Required. How the alert shows up in the list.
Short window in minutes	Required, positive integer.
Long window in minutes	Required, must be greater than short.
Burn rate threshold	Required, must be > 1.
Notification channels	Multi-select from the workspace’s notification channels — at least one is required.
Enabled	Toggle. Disabled alerts show a Disabled chip but keep their config.

The four presets

Four preset buttons sit above the create form. Each picks a common responsiveness-vs-noise tradeoff:

Preset (button label)	Short / Long	Threshold	When to use
Critical (1m / 5m, 14.4×)	1 m / 5 m	14.4×	Page immediately — for very high-priority SLOs.
Fast (5m / 1h, 14.4×)	5 m / 1 h	14.4×	Page now — catches sudden outages.
Slow (30m / 6h, 6×)	30 m / 6 h	6×	Catches gradual problems before the budget runs out.
Background (2h / 24h, 3×)	2 h / 24 h	3×	Daily-check level for less critical SLOs.

Clicking a preset fills the form fields and seeds a default name (Critical burn, Fast burn, etc.). You can rename and tweak any field before saving.

Create a burn-rate alert

1. Open the SLO’s detail page.
2. Scroll to Burn-rate alerts and click Add burn-rate alert.
3. Select a preset (recommended) or fill in short / long / threshold manually.
4. Name the alert.
5. Select one or more Notification channels.
6. Leave Enabled on (or off if you want to stage the alert).
7. Click Save.

Workspace-wide burn-rate alerts

The workspace-wide page at /<workspaceId>/slos/alerts lists every burn-rate alert across every SLO.

Columns: State / Alert / SLO / Channels. Each row shows its parent SLO’s name and SLI kind — there’s no Service column, since most SLOs aren’t tied to a service.

Default sort is firing-first — currently-firing alerts at the top. The State chip reads Firing for X, Quiet, or Disabled.

Filters:

• Firing only toggle. The Overview hub’s e.g. “N alerts firing” chip deep-links here with this toggle on via ?firing=1.

Click any row to open the parent SLO’s detail page — alerts are created and edited from there.

Permissions

Workspace admin is required to create, edit, or delete burn-rate alerts. Everyone else can read the list.

Related

• SLO detail — where burn-rate alerts live per SLO.
• Notification Channels — set up the channels burn-rate alerts dispatch to.
• What is an SLO? — burn-rate definition.