What is a burn rate alert?

It is an alert that fires when you are consuming error budget faster than a chosen multiple of the steady rate. A common setup pairs a fast-burn alert (around 14.4x, page now) with a slow-burn alert (around 1x to 6x, open a ticket) so outages and slow leaks both surface without alerting on every blip.

Why is 14.4x the common threshold?

It is the rate that burns a 30-day error budget in roughly two days, which Google's SRE workbook popularised as a fast-burn page. It is a balance: fast enough to catch a real outage early, slow enough not to fire on short, harmless spikes.

Burn Rate

Burn rate is how fast you are spending an error budget relative to spending it evenly: 1x exhausts it exactly at the end of the window, 14.4x exhausts it in about two days.

also: burn rate · error budget burn rate · burn rate alert

14.4x burn rate30-day budget gone in ≈ 2 daysGoogle's fast-burn page threshold

Burn rate normalises consumption against the window. At 1x you would use the whole budget precisely when the 30-day window ends. At 10x you would be out in three days. Google's widely used fast-burn alert fires at 14.4x, the rate that would drain a 30-day budget in roughly two days, because that is fast enough to matter but slow enough not to page on noise.

Alerting on burn rate beats alerting on a raw error threshold. A flat rule like '5xx over 1%' pages at 3am for a blip that costs nothing and stays silent through a slow leak that quietly eats the whole month. Multi-window, multi-burn-rate alerts (a fast one for outages, a slow one for leaks) catch both without drowning on-call.

free_toolSLO & Error Budget CalculatorTurn an availability target into the downtime, failed requests, and burn rate it allows.

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Questions & answers

What is a burn rate alert?: It is an alert that fires when you are consuming error budget faster than a chosen multiple of the steady rate. A common setup pairs a fast-burn alert (around 14.4x, page now) with a slow-burn alert (around 1x to 6x, open a ticket) so outages and slow leaks both surface without alerting on every blip.
Why is 14.4x the common threshold?: It is the rate that burns a 30-day error budget in roughly two days, which Google's SRE workbook popularised as a fast-burn page. It is a balance: fast enough to catch a real outage early, slow enough not to fire on short, harmless spikes.

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