Creating an alerting policy

Alerting policies for the burn rate of your error budget are based on the time-series selector select_slo_burn_rate , described in Retrieving SLO data . There are other time-series selectors, and you can use some of them as the basis for alerting policies. For a discussion of SLO-based alerting policies, see Alerting on your burn rate .

You create alerting policies by using the alertPolicies.create method. The general use of this method is documented in Managing alerting policies .

Alerting policies for SLOs are similar to other metric-threshold alerting policies, but they differ in one specific way: the filter in the MetricThreshold specification of the condition uses a time-series selector instead of a pair of metric and monitored-resource types.

Conditions for SLO-based alerting policies

An alerting policy must have at least one condition. For a SLO-based condition, use a MetricThreshold -type condition.

A metric-threshold condition can contain two pairs of time-series configurations: filter and aggregations . Because SLO data is retrieved differently than other time-series data, the only field used in a condition for an SLO is the filter field.

A condition for an SLO does set the comparison , thresholdValue , duration , and trigger fields.

This example creates a condition that is violated when the burn rate exceeds 2 times the normal rate. The structure looks like this:

  "conditions": [
    {
      "displayName":"SLO burn rate alert for ${SLO_ID} exceeds 2",
      "conditionThreshold": {
        "filter": DATA_RETRIEVAL_FILTER_FOR_SLO 
,
        "comparison":"COMPARISON_GT",
        "thresholdValue": 2,
        "duration": {
          "seconds":"0",
        },
      },
    }
  ],

To set the filter field, you need the resource name of a specific SLO. This value is of the form projects/${PROJECT}/services/${SERVICE_ID}/serviceLevelObjectives/${SLO_ID} . For information on finding the SLO ID, see Listing SLOs .

To create an alert on burn rate, use the time-series selector select_slo_burn_rate . This selector takes two values, the target SLO and the lookback period. For more information, see select_slo_burn_rate .

For example, the following filter gets the burn rate of the target SLO with a 1-hour lookback period:

"filter":"select_slo_burn_rate(\"projects/${PROJECT}/services/${SERVICE_ID}/serviceLevelObjectives/${SLO_ID}\", \"60m\")"

The rest of the alerting policy

To complete the alerting policy, specify values for the remaining fields:

• displayName : A description of the alerting policy.
• combiner : Describes the logic for combining conditions. This policy has only one condition, so either AND or OR works.
• notificationChannels : An array of existing notification channels to use when the alerting policy is triggered. For information on finding and creating notification channels, see Notification channels .
• documentation : Information that is sent when the condition is violated to help recipients diagnose the problem. For details, see Documentation .

Creating the alerting policy

The following example uses the API to create a burn-rate alerting policy. For information about listing, modifying, and deleting alerting policies, see Managing alerting policies by API .