Define SLIs and burn-rate alerts using Honeycomb's native SLO feature
domain: docs.honeycomb.io · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Verified — individually fact-checked against live docscommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Verified steps
Create a Calculated Field containing a boolean expression that defines your SLI (e.g. requests meeting a latency or success threshold)
Create an SLO in the Honeycomb UI (or via the `honeycombio_slo` Terraform resource) referencing that Calculated Field, selecting the dataset(s)/service(s), time period, and target percentage
Create a Burn Alert referencing the SLO, choosing exhaustion-time or budget-rate thresholds for when to fire
Route the burn alert to a notification channel such as Slack, PagerDuty, or a webhook
If managing via Terraform, use a `create_before_destroy` lifecycle on the underlying Calculated Field resource since fields in active use by an SLO can't simply be renamed or deleted
Monitor the SLO's burn-down over its evaluation window and adjust the target or SLI definition as traffic patterns change
Known gotchas
SLOs are a paid-tier (Pro/Enterprise) Honeycomb feature, not available on free plans
Multi-dataset SLOs need a Calculated Field defined at a shared/environment level rather than a single dataset
Confirm the exact SLO/Burn Alert API endpoint paths against current Honeycomb docs before automating outside Terraform, since this wasn't independently verified beyond the UI and Terraform provider in this research pass
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