Silences and SLOs

Silences and SLOs

Silences — mute expected noise

1. Go to Alerts → Silences → Create silence.
2. Scope it: a service, environment, or a specific alert/rule.
3. Set a start and an expiry (always set an expiry — a deploy window, a maintenance hour).
4. The rule keeps evaluating; you simply aren't paged for the muted scope.

SLOs and error budgets

Open the SLOs tab to define a Service-Level Objective on a user-facing metric and track its error budget.

1. Choose the metric — typically Availability (success rate) or a latency target.
2. Set the objective (e.g. 99.9%) and the window (e.g. 30 days).
3. VerOps computes the remaining error budget and burn rate.
4. Add a burn-rate alert so you're paged when you're spending the budget too fast (e.g. 2% of the monthly budget in an hour) — not on every transient blip.

SLO: 99.9% of checkout requests succeed over 30 days
  error budget = 0.1% of requests
  fast burn alert: > 2% of budget consumed in 1h  -> page

SLOs focus attention on what users feel. Pair them with silences during planned work to keep the signal clean.