A platform team adds an SLO-based alert that fires when the error budget burn rate is high enough to exhaust the budget within hours, even though users have not yet reported problems. Which monitoring approach does this represent?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: A
Burn-rate alerts are proactive because they warn when the trend predicts that the error budget will run out, even if users are not yet visibly affected. The team gets time to act before the objective is breached. Reactive monitoring responds after impact is already visible, while billing reports and manual dashboard checks measure different things or lack timely signals.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Reactive monitoring waits for impact to appear, such as an outage ticket. A burn-rate alert fires earlier, based on the predicted trend, so this label is wrong.
- C. Spend tracking measures money, not service reliability. Error budget burn rate concerns how fast reliability is being consumed.
- D. Manual dashboard checks depend on someone looking at the right time. An automated burn-rate alert is designed to fire without that human step.