Honeycomb SLOs and Triggers
Requires the Honeycomb connector in the Agent Space, with its read tools enabled. Creating a board, SLO or trigger needs write access: Read-write at sign-in, or a key with Write under Model Context Protocol. If a create tool is missing or returns a permission error, stop and tell the operator that it needs write access. Do not retry.
Guidance for configuring and reasoning about reliability in Honeycomb. The get_slos
and get_triggers tools document their own parameters — this skill focuses on
designing effective SLOs, choosing between SLOs and triggers, and interpreting
what the numbers mean.
Availability: SLOs require Pro or Enterprise plan. Triggers available on all plans.
SLO vs Trigger — When to Use Which
| Question | SLO | Trigger |
|---|---|---|
| "Are we meeting our reliability commitments?" | Yes | No |
| "Is something broken right now?" | No | Yes |
| "How fast are we burning our error budget?" | Yes (burn alerts) | No |
| "Did error count exceed a threshold?" | No | Yes |
| "Should we slow down deploys?" | Yes (budget remaining) | No |
Rule of thumb: SLOs measure reliability against commitments over time. Triggers catch immediate operational issues.
Designing Effective SLOs
Define the SLI
An SLI is a per-event boolean: was this event successful? Implemented as a calculated field returning undefined (not a relevant event), 1 (success), or 0 (failure).
- Format:
IF(<qualifying-condition>, <success-condition>)The qualifying condition filters to relevant events; the success condition defines what counts as success. If the qualifying condition is not met, the formula returns undefined, and the SLI is unpopulated. - Specific Qualifying Condition: Choose the relevant subset of events (e.g.
AND(EQUALS($http.route, "/checkout"), NOT(EXISTS($trace.parent_id)))for root spans of checkout endpoint) - Latency Success Condition:
LTE(duration_ms, 500)— requests faster than 500ms - Availability Success Condition:
LTE(http.status_code, 499)— non-5xx responses - Business Logic Success Condition:
EQUALS(checkout.status, "completed")— successful checkouts
Set the Target
- Start conservative (99% before 99.99%)
- Measure current baseline first with P50/P99 queries
- Set target slightly above current performance
- Ask: what reliability do users actually need?
Configure Exhaustion Time Alerts
At minimum, two alerts:
- Near exhaustion (exhaustion time ~4h): pages on-call via PagerDuty
- Trending to exhaustion (budget rate over 24h): notifies team via Slack
Configure Burn Rate Alerts
Detect fast burns even if the budget isn't close to exhaustion yet. For example:
- 1h burn rate > 10x — page on-call
Recommend these alerts to the user after an SLO is created. Agents do not have the ability to set up these alerts or their recipients.
Best Practices
- Measure close to the user (at the edge, not deep in the stack)
- Design around user workflows, not team boundaries
- Favor broad SLOs over many narrow ones
- Start with one SLO, reduce noise, then expand
Interpreting SLO Status
When reviewing SLOs with get_slos:
- Budget remaining > 50%: Healthy — room for risk
- Budget remaining 10-50%: Caution — slow down changes
- Budget remaining < 10%: At risk — freeze non-critical deploys
- Budget negative: Breached — investigate immediately with the honeycomb-production-investigation skill
- Compliance at 0%: Likely misconfigured SLI (wrong column, inverted logic, no matching events) — check the SLI definition
Configuring Triggers
Prefer Count-Based Over Percentile-Based
"50 requests slower than 2s" is more actionable than "P99 is 2100ms."
Use COUNT WHERE duration_ms > threshold instead of P99 triggers.
Common Patterns
- Error spike: COUNT WHERE error = true, threshold > N in 5 min
- Slow requests: COUNT WHERE duration_ms > 2000, threshold > N in 5 min
- Traffic drop: COUNT WHERE is_root, threshold < N in 10 min (below normal)
Best Practices
- Name: What the alert is. Description: What to do (link to runbook).
- Set duration 5-10 min minimum to avoid flapping
- Start less sensitive, tighten based on false positive rate
Multi-Service SLOs
Share a single error budget across up to 10 services.
- SLI must be an environment-level calculated field
- Events from included services weighted equally
- Use cases: multiple edge services, monolith-to-microservices migration
Check in with the user
Create an SLO or trigger only when the operator asks for one. Workspaces in Honeycomb have a limited number of SLOs and triggers. Before executing the create tool, display all parameters and your reasoning, and ask for confirmation.
Constructing links to SLOs
The tools you have will not let you link directly to the SLO page in Honeycomb. Instead, you can link to the list of SLOs.
/<team_slug>/environments/<environment_slug>/slos
Additional Resources
Reference Files
references/slo-design-guide.md— Detailed SLO design methodology, multi-service SLOs, error budget mathreferences/trigger-examples.md— Complete trigger example library organized by use casereferences/alerting-strategy.md— How to combine SLO burn alerts and triggers into a cohesive alerting strategy
Cross-References
- For constructing SLI queries and calculated fields, see the honeycomb-query-patterns skill
- For investigating SLO budget burn, see the honeycomb-production-investigation skill
