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The latest News and Information on Service Reliability Engineering and related technologies.

Burn rate is a better error rate

While building our Service Level Objectives (SLO) product, our team at Datadog often needs to consider how error budget and burn rate work in practice. Although error budgets and burn rates are discussed in foundational sources such as Google’s Site Reliability Workbook, for many these terms remain ambiguous. Is an error budget a static quantity or a varying percentage? Does burn rate indicate how fast I’m spending a fixed quantity, or is it just another way to express error rate?