Recipe: Error budget policy writer

Generate SLO-driven error budget policies from your service metrics.

Define your SLO target

Start with a single number: your desired availability percentage. Common targets are 99.9%, 99.95%, or 99.99%. This becomes the anchor for every downstream policy decision.

slo_target: 99.95 # three-nines-five

Calculate the budget

Error budget = 100% − SLO target. For 99.95%, you get 0.05% allowable error over your measurement window. Translate this into concrete numbers your team can act on.

monthly_budget_seconds = 30 * 24 * 3600 * 0.0005 # 1296s

Write the policy

Burn rate thresholds determine when to page. A 14.4x burn rate consumes the entire monthly budget in 5 days. Set alerting at 2x (48h exhaustion) for early warning and 10x (6h) for critical.

alert_rules:
  - burn_rate: 2x → warning
  - burn_rate: 10x → critical
  - burn_rate: 14.4x → page

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