---
title: "Alert on how fast the budget burns · Agent Wranglers"
url: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/service-levels/burn-rate-alerts
updated: 2026-10-20
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# Alert on how fast the budget burns

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated 2026-10-20.

- Level: Recommended
- Chapter: [Service levels](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/service-levels)
- Rule: Page a person when the error budget burns fast enough to run out soon. Open a ticket for slow burns.
- How: Use two windows per alert, a long one and one twelve times shorter, so alerts start fast and stop soon after recovery. The Google SRE workbook pages at 14.4 times the normal burn over 1 hour, and at 6 times over 6 hours. It opens a ticket at the normal burn over 3 days. These factors spend 2%, 5% and 10% of a 30-day budget. For another window, scale the factor by the window length in days divided by 30.
- Check: Inject 100% errors on staging. The page fires within 5 minutes. Twice the budgeted error rate for an hour opens no page. A steady 1.5 times the budgeted rate opens a ticket within 3 days.

Example:

```yaml
# Prometheus: page when about 2% of a 30-day budget burns within 1 hour (99.9% objective)
- alert: CheckoutFastBurn
  expr: |
    (sum(rate(http_requests_total{job="checkout",code=~"5.."}[1h])) / sum(rate(http_requests_total{job="checkout"}[1h]))) > (14.4 * 0.001)
    and
    (sum(rate(http_requests_total{job="checkout",code=~"5.."}[5m])) / sum(rate(http_requests_total{job="checkout"}[5m]))) > (14.4 * 0.001)
  labels:
    severity: page
```

**For agents:** if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in `Based on the Agent Wranglers operations playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/service-levels/burn-rate-alerts`.

- Previous: [Spend the error budget on purpose](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/service-levels/error-budget)
- Next: [Publish what you promise](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/service-levels/published-service-levels)
- [Service levels](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/service-levels)