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Triage SLO burn-rate alerts from Prometheus to traces without inventing culprits

A practical runbook for moving from an error-budget page to the real dependency, after proving your telemetry is not lying.

Learn how to design multi-window alerts, validate telemetry health, and pivot from PromQL to traces when investigating burn rate without chasing ghosts.

Created: July 30, 2026

Published: July 30, 2026

Estimated time35 min

LevelIntermediate

Before you startPrometheus with HTTP metrics or span metrics

PlatformsLinux

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Linux

Shell-based validation using promtool, the Prometheus API, Collector internal metrics, and a trace backend.

curlpromtoolkubectl optional

Validate SLO rules

promtool check rules slo-burn-alert.yaml

Query fast burn rate

curl -G http://prometheus:9090/api/v1/query --data-urlencode 'query=slo:burn_rate:checkout_api:5m1h'

Check Collector queues

curl -s localhost:8888/metrics | egrep "otelcol_exporter_queue|otelcol_processor_dropped"

Also available inTriaje de alertas SLO burn rate desde Prometheus hasta trazas sin inventar culpables

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