slos-and-triggers

SLOs track long-term reliability commitments using budget burn rates, while Triggers configure actionable alerts for immediate operational issues. Use SLOs to measure compliance against targets and Triggers to page on-call for sudden anomalies.

To configure SLO burn alerts effectively, set thresholds based on budget consumption speed over time. Designing proper burn alert thresholds helps distinguish critical exhaustion requiring immediate action from minor variations that do not warrant paging on-call.

You should freeze deploys when SLO budget burn rates indicate rapid exhaustion of your reliability target. Interpreting burn rate heuristics helps you decide whether to halt deployments to protect remaining error budget or page on-call for active incidents.

Detect misconfigured SLIs by analyzing SLO compliance data and trigger statuses. If your latency SLOs consistently show unrealistic compliance or trigger false alerts, the underlying SLI definitions likely need recalibration to reflect actual user experience.

A good SLO target balances user expectations with operational capacity for reliability. Setting appropriate targets involves defining effective SLIs that measure critical user journeys and configuring burn alerts that trigger actions before error budgets are fully exhausted.

Yes, you can use Triggers instead of SLOs for immediate alerting when you need to detect sudden operational issues. Triggers are designed for actionable, real-time alerts, whereas SLOs are better suited for measuring long-term reliability and budget burn.