Documentation Grafana Cloud Alerts and IRM SLO Additional configuration Configure burn-rate notifications

Configure burn-rate notifications

Burn rate alerts trigger when an SLO is at risk of being breached.

When an SLO has alert rules enabled, Grafana Alerting generates the corresponding burn-rate alert rules under the Grafana SLO folder.

When Grafana SLO creates alert rules, it automatically adds a set of labels to uniquely identify them, including grafana_slo_uuid, grafana_slo_window, and grafana_slo_severity.

By default, Grafana SLO uses the grafana_slo_severity label to differentiate:

• Fast-burn alerts use grafana_slo_severity="critical".
• Slow-burn alerts use grafana_slo_severity="warning".

Burn-rate alerts

Burn-rate (SLO) alerts are based on the error budget burn rate metric, which measures how quickly a service consumes its error budget:

• > 1 means the service exhausts the error budget before the end of the SLO time window.
• = 1 means the service exhausts the error budget exactly at the end of the SLO time window.
• < 1 means the service doesn’t exhaust the error budget within the SLO time window.

Burn-rate alerts follow practices from the Google SRE workbook. To explore the queries and conditions for each alert, go to Alert rules in Grafana Alerting.

Fast-burn alerts

Fast-burn alerts (grafana_slo_severity="critical") fire when the error budget would be consumed over minutes or hours.

They evaluate shorter time periods and trigger if any of these conditions are met:

1. The burn rate is at least 14.4× when averaged over the last 5 minutes and the last hour.
2. The burn rate is at least 6× when averaged over the last 30 minutes and the last 6 hours.

Slow-burn alerts

Slow-burn alerts (grafana_slo_severity="warning") fire when the error budget would be consumed over hours or days.

They evaluate longer time periods and trigger if any of these conditions are met:

1. The burn rate is at least 3× when averaged over the last 2 hours and the last 24 hours.
2. The burn rate is at least 1× when averaged over the last 6 hours and the last 72 hours.

Configure notifications

To configure where to receive SLO alert notifications, complete the following steps in Grafana Alerting:

1. Configure notification policies to handle SLO alert notifications.

   Use the service, team, or other SLO labels to match alert labels in the notification policy. Then use the grafana_slo_severity label to route alerts by severity.

   A notification policy is often designed to handle related alerts. For instance, you can create a policy to handle all fast-burn alerts for a specific service or team.

2. Configure a contact point for each notification policy.

   Notification policies that handle fast-burn alerts should use a paging system, such as Grafana IRM, because these alerts often require immediate action or team response.

   For policies handling slow-burn alerts, use ticketing systems such as Jira or ServiceNow, or send notifications to a team channel.

The following example shows a basic notification policy tree for SLO alerts:

For more details on setting up notifications, refer to Grafana Alerting notifications.