SLA Error Budget & Burn-Rate Alerts
Availability: Team, Business, and Enterprise plans
The error budget and burn-rate system gives you an early warning before a real SLA breach — not just a report of yesterday’s failure. It’s inspired by the Google SRE approach to reliability engineering.
What is an error budget?
An error budget is the total amount of downtime you can afford over a month while still meeting your SLA target.
| SLA target | Monthly budget | Daily budget | Hourly budget |
|---|---|---|---|
| 99.9% | 43.8 min | 1.44 min | 3.6 sec |
| 99.95% | 21.9 min | 0.72 min | 1.8 sec |
| 99.99% | 4.4 min | 8.6 sec | 0.36 sec |
Once the budget is exhausted, your service is in SLA breach for the rest of the month.
What is burn rate?
Burn rate is how fast you’re consuming your error budget, measured as a multiple of the sustainable rate.
- Burn rate = 1× → consuming exactly the right amount per hour (will just barely meet SLA)
- Burn rate = 2× → consuming twice as fast; budget exhausted halfway through the month
- Burn rate = 10× → budget exhausted in 3 days
StatusPage.me fires a burn-rate alert when the rate exceeds 2× — meaning your monthly budget would be exhausted in less than 15 days at the current pace.
How it works
Every hour, the system:
- Counts downtime minutes for the monitor over the last hour.
- Computes the hourly budget fraction:
monthly_budget_min / (30.44 × 24). - Divides downtime by the hourly fraction to get the burn rate.
- If burn rate ≥ 2× — fires an alert (4-hour cooldown).
Setting an SLA target
- Open the monitor edit screen.
- Under SLA Target, enter your target percentage (e.g.,
99.9). - Save.
The burn-rate alert activates automatically for Team+ accounts once a target is set. No additional configuration is needed.
What the alert looks like
🔥 SLA error budget burning fast: API Gateway
SLA target: 99.900%
Monthly budget: 43.8 minutes
Downtime in the last hour: 5.0 minutes
Burn rate: 8.3×
Estimated time to budget exhaustion at current rate: 5.3 hours
Reduce downtime now to preserve your monthly error budget.
Plan availability
| Feature | Free | Starter | Team | Business | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SLA target setting | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Daily SLA breach email | — | — | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Burn-rate (hourly) alert | — | — | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| P95 latency SLA alert | — | — | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |