---
title: SLO Alerts
description: >-
  Create SLO alerts to monitor error budget consumption and burn rates, ensuring
  service reliability targets are maintained.
breadcrumbs: Docs > Monitors > Monitor Types > SLO Alerts
---

# SLO Alerts

{% alert level="info" %}
This monitor is available for the Metric-based SLOs, Time Slice SLOs, and Monitor-based SLOs composed of Metric Monitor types (Metric, Integration, APM Metric, Anomaly, Forecast, or Outlier Monitors).
{% /alert %}

## Overview{% #overview %}

[Service Level Objectives](https://docs.datadoghq.com/service_level_objectives.md), or SLOs, are a key part of the site reliability engineering toolkit. SLOs provide a framework for defining clear targets around application performance, which ultimately help teams provide a consistent customer experience, balance feature development with platform stability, and improve communication with internal and external users.

## Monitor creation{% #monitor-creation %}

To create an [SLO alert](https://app.datadoghq.com/monitors/create/slo) in Datadog, use the main navigation: *Monitors –> New Monitor –> SLO*.

### Select SLO{% #select-slo %}

Select a [Service Level Objective](https://docs.datadoghq.com/service_level_objectives.md).

### Set alert conditions{% #set-alert-conditions %}

Two types of alerts are available:

[Error budget alerts](https://docs.datadoghq.com/service_level_objectives/error_budget.md) notify you when a certain percentage of your SLO's error budget has been consumed.

[Burn rate alerts](https://docs.datadoghq.com/service_level_objectives/burn_rate.md) notify you when the rate of consumption of your SLO error budget has exceeded your specified threshold and is sustained for a certain period of time.

### Notifications{% #notifications %}

For detailed instructions on the **Configure notifications and automations** section, see the [Notifications](https://docs.datadoghq.com/monitors/notify.md#overview) page.

In addition to the [standard template variables](https://docs.datadoghq.com/monitors/notify/variables.md?tab=is_alert#template-variables) available across all monitor types, SLO alerts also support the following variables:

| Variable                     | Description                                                               |
| ---------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `{{timeframe}}`              | The time window of the SLO (7, 30, 90 days).                              |
| `{{value}}`                  | The percentage of error budget consumed (error budget alerts only).       |
| `{{short_window_burn_rate}}` | The burn rate value observed by the short window (burn rate alerts only). |
| `{{long_window_burn_rate}}`  | The burn rate value observed by the long window (burn rate alerts only).  |

## Further reading{% #further-reading %}

- [Burn Rate Alerts](https://docs.datadoghq.com/service_level_objectives/burn_rate.md)
- [Error Budget Alerts](https://docs.datadoghq.com/service_level_objectives/error_budget.md)