---
title: Error Budget Alerts
description: Use Monitors to alert off of the error budget consumption of an SLO
breadcrumbs: Docs > Service Level Objectives > Error Budget Alerts
---

# Error Budget Alerts

## Overview{% #overview %}

SLO error budget alerts are threshold based and notify you when a certain percentage of your SLO's error budget has been consumed. For example, alert me if 75% of the error budget for my 7-day target is consumed. Warn me if 50% is consumed (optional).

Error budget alerts are available for the following SLO types:

- [Metric-based SLOs](https://docs.datadoghq.com/service_level_objectives/metric.md),
- [Monitor-based SLOs](https://docs.datadoghq.com/service_level_objectives/monitor.md) that are only composed of Metric Monitor types (Metric, Integration, APM Metric, Anomaly, Forecast, or Outlier Monitors), and
- [Time Slice SLOs](https://docs.datadoghq.com/service_level_objectives/time_slice.md)

For a description of key terminology around SLOs, including *error budgets*, see [Service Level Objectives](https://docs.datadoghq.com/service_level_objectives.md#key-terminology).

{% image
   source="https://docs.dd-static.net/images/service_management/service_level_objectives/slo-error-budget-alert-v2.49905110b1ca41a1b9b39fae160c35ff.png?auto=format&fit=max&w=850 1x, https://docs.dd-static.net/images/service_management/service_level_objectives/slo-error-budget-alert-v2.49905110b1ca41a1b9b39fae160c35ff.png?auto=format&fit=max&w=850&dpr=2 2x"
   alt="Error budget alert configuration" /%}

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

1. Navigate to the [SLO status page](https://app.datadoghq.com/slo).
1. Create a new SLO or edit an existing one, then click the **Save and Set Alert** button. For existing SLOs, you can also click the **Set up Alerts** button in the SLO detail side panel to take you directly to the alert configuration.
1. Select the **Error Budget** tab in **Step 1: Setting alerting conditions**.
1. Set an alert to trigger when the percentage of the error budget consumed is above the `threshold`. over the past `target` number of days.
1. Add [Notification information](https://docs.datadoghq.com/monitors/notify.md) in the **Configure notifications and automations** section.
1. Click the **Create & Set Alert** button on the SLO configuration page.

{% image
   source="https://docs.dd-static.net/images/service_management/service_level_objectives/slo_create_set_alert.c2b8ed29f91e167d6caf82637ee52e20.png?auto=format&fit=max&w=850 1x, https://docs.dd-static.net/images/service_management/service_level_objectives/slo_create_set_alert.c2b8ed29f91e167d6caf82637ee52e20.png?auto=format&fit=max&w=850&dpr=2 2x"
   alt="Create SLO and set up an error budget alert" /%}

### Alerting for SLOs with groups{% #alerting-for-slos-with-groups %}

For Time Slice SLOs containing groups, you can set error budget alerts based on the SLO groups or the overall SLO. If you alert based on the groups, you can confiure the [alert aggregation](https://docs.datadoghq.com/monitors/configuration.md#set-alert-aggregation) to use simple or multi alerts. For metric-based and monitor-based SLOs, you can only set error budget alerts based on the overall SLO.

### API and Terraform{% #api-and-terraform %}

You can create SLO error budget alerts using the [create-monitor API endpoint](https://docs.datadoghq.com/api/v1/monitors.md#create-a-monitor). Below is an example query for an SLO monitor, which alerts when more than 75% of the error budget of an SLO is consumed. Replace *slo\_id* with the alphanumeric ID of the SLO you wish to configure a burn rate alert on and replace *time\_window* with one of 7d, 30d or 90d - depending on which target is used to configure your SLO:

```
error_budget("slo_id").over("time_window") > 75
```

In addition, SLO error budget alerts can also be created using the [datadog_monitor resource in Terraform](https://registry.terraform.io/providers/DataDog/datadog/latest/docs/resources/monitor). Below is an example `.tf` for configuring an error budget alert for a metric-based SLO using the same example query as above.

**For provider versions v2.7.0 or earlier and v2.13.0 or later**

**Note:** SLO error budget alerts are only supported in Terraform provider v2.7.0 or earlier and in provider v2.13.0 or later. Versions between v2.7.0 and v2.13.0 are not supported.

```
resource "datadog_monitor" "metric-based-slo" {
    name = "SLO Error Budget Alert Example"
    type  = "slo alert"
    
    query = <<EOT
    error_budget("slo_id").over("time_window") > 75 
    EOT

    message = "Example monitor message"
    monitor_thresholds {
      critical = 75
    }
    tags = ["foo:bar", "baz"]
}
```

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

- [Overview of Service Level Objectives](https://docs.datadoghq.com/service_level_objectives.md)