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Difficulty: EasyDefining and Managing SLOs, SLIs, and Error Budgets

A Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team manages an e-commerce inventory search API deployed on Cloud Run. The team has established a 30-day rolling Service Level Objective (SLO) of 99.9% availability. They want to receive actionable notifications when an outage threatens to consume their remaining error budget, while avoiding alert fatigue caused by brief, temporary error spikes. Which alerting approach should the team implement in Cloud Monitoring?

  1. Configure a multi-window burn-rate alert policy based on the rate of error budget consumption.Answer
  2. B
    Configure a static threshold alert policy that triggers whenever CPU utilization on Cloud Run instances exceeds 85%.
  3. C
    Configure a static metric threshold alert policy that triggers immediately whenever the HTTP 5xx failure rate exceeds 0.1% for 1 minute.
  4. D
    Configure an alert policy based on backend database query latency exceeding a fixed limit of 500 milliseconds.

Answer

The team should configure a multi-window burn-rate alert policy based on the rate of error budget consumption.
Configuring multi-window burn-rate alerting ensures notifications fire based on the actual speed of error budget consumption. By evaluating both short (e.g., 1 hour) and long (e.g., 6 hours) windows, Cloud Monitoring alerts SREs when a true incident threatens the 30-day SLO budget while suppressing noise from temporary single-minute spikes.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the primary operational requirement.
The requirement is to alert on significant error budget consumption for a 99.9% availability SLO while preventing alert fatigue from brief transient spikes.
SRE best practices require aligning alerts directly with customer-impacting SLO breaches rather than raw infrastructure metrics.
2
Evaluate alert mechanism types in SRE practices.
Multi-window burn-rate alerting measures how rapidly the error budget is being spent relative to the SLO target across both short and long lookback windows.
This guarantees high precision (firing when an incident actually threatens the budget) and high recall (catching fast outages quickly).

Key Concept

Error Budget Burn-Rate Alerting
Estimated Time:45s
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Topics

Defining and Managing SLOs, SLIs, and Error Budgets

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