Reference · Glossary

Burn rate

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Burn rate measures how fast you are consuming an error budget — useful for alerting before an SLO is fully breached.

#When to use

Production AI and API services where you need visibility, safer deploys, or verified inbound callbacks.

#When not to

Local one-off notebooks with no users. Do not collect high-cardinality labels “just in case.”

#Practical tips

  • Prefer a few well-named metrics over dozens of vanity charts
  • Alert on symptoms users feel (errors, latency) before chasing every gauge
  • Keep runbooks next to dashboards

#Learn next