Kubernetes SLO Alerting with Prometheus Burn Rates
Define a real SLO on Kubernetes, then build multi-window burn rate alerts in Prometheus and Alertmanager that page you before the budget is gone.
What You'll Learn
Architecture Overview & Problem Statement
This project defines a 99% availability SLO for a Kubernetes service and enforces it with multi-window burn rate alerts in Prometheus, routed through...
Milestone 1: Prepare the Cluster and Monitoring Stack
This milestone gives you a cluster with kube-prometheus-stack running.
Milestone 2: Deploy an App That Exposes Request Metrics
This milestone deploys the service you will measure. An SLO needs a request counter with a status code, so the app must expose one.
Milestone 3: Define the SLI and SLO
This milestone turns a vague goal into a measurable promise.
Milestone 4: Write Recording Rules for Every Window
This milestone pre-computes the error ratio over each time window.
Milestone 5: Create Multi-Window Burn Rate Alerts
This milestone creates the alerts. Each one fires only when a long window and a short window both exceed the same burn rate.
Skills You'll Master
Curriculum Index10 topics
Architecture Overview & Problem Statement
This project defines a 99% availability SLO for a Kubernetes service and enforces it with multi-window burn rate alerts...
Milestone 1: Prepare the Cluster and Monitoring Stack
This milestone gives you a cluster with kube-prometheus-stack running.
Milestone 2: Deploy an App That Exposes Request Metrics
This milestone deploys the service you will measure.
Milestone 3: Define the SLI and SLO
This milestone turns a vague goal into a measurable promise.
Milestone 4: Write Recording Rules for Every Window
This milestone pre-computes the error ratio over each time window.
Milestone 5: Create Multi-Window Burn Rate Alerts
This milestone creates the alerts. Each one fires only when a long window and a short window both exceed the same burn...
Milestone 6: Route Pages and Tickets to Slack
This milestone sends critical alerts to one channel and warnings to another.
Milestone 7: Build the SLO Dashboard
This milestone makes the error budget visible to people who do not read PromQL.
Milestone 8: Write the Error Budget Policy
This milestone records what the team does as the budget runs down. An SLO that changes no decisions is decoration.
Validation & Testing
First confirm the pieces exist: Then break the service on purpose.
Career Impact
Roles that use the skills in this module.
Site Reliability Engineer
DevOps Engineer
Platform Engineer
Part of Kubernetes Networking and Traffic Management
Configuring Ingress Controllers with NGINX for Production Traffic
Configure NGINX Ingress Controllers on Kubernetes to route production HTTP and HTTPS traffic with SSL termination, path routing, and rate limiting.
Debugging Kubernetes Networking with kubectl and CNI Plugins
Diagnose and fix Kubernetes pod networking failures, DNS resolution issues, and CNI plugin misconfigurations using kubectl, netshoot, and network policy debugging tools.
Kubernetes Network Policies for Pod-Level Traffic Control
By default, every pod in a Kubernetes cluster can talk to every other pod — regardless of namespace, team, or sensitivity. Network Policies are Kubernetes firewall rules that restrict this. They define which pods are allowed to send traffic to which other pods, and which external IPs can reach your services. Without them, a compromised frontend pod can directly connect to your production database.
Next Modules
Related Guides
Practice on the Coding Sheet
Not a software engineer sheet. Every problem comes from real DevOps, SRE, Platform and Cloud interviews, from your first script to a system you build yourself.
Open the Coding Sheet