Set health targets for a service

Say how often a service's monitor checks must pass and how fast they must answer, then watch the room left for failures on the service page and Home.

In short

Health targets turn a service's monitors into a promise: for example 99.9% of checks pass and 95% answer within 300 ms over 28 days. The service page then shows how much of the error budget is left, and the owners are told when it runs low.

Before you start

The service needs monitors. Link a monitor, or the API project, request or suite it checks, on the service page. See /help/designer/service-page.

Who: the owners of the service are told when its error budget runs low.
Plan: Designer and monitoring must both be on your plan (Free allows basic monitors, see /help/api-testing/monitors-and-alerts).

Steps

Open the service page (Designer › Services, then the service) and find "Health targets".
Press "Set targets".
Type "Checks that must pass (%)", such as 99.9.
If you like, type an "Answer time (ms)" and "Checks that must answer in time (%)" (95 unless you change it).
Keep the "Window (days)" at 28, or choose 7 to 30, and press "Save targets".

Result: the section shows the state, "Error budget left", "Checks passed", "Answered in time" and "Burn rate, last day".

What the states mean

Good to know

Example: at 99.9% over 28 days with 8,000 checks, 8 failed checks spend the whole budget.
Monitors that call a mock or a preview are left out, and so are checks made while a test was in quarantine.
The services map shows each service's state, and Home's "Needs you" lists your services whose budget is nearly or fully spent.
Owners who muted Designer in their notification settings are not told.

If something goes wrong

"No monitor checks in this window yet." - link a monitor to the service, or wait for its first checks.
"Enter a number from 50 to 99.99." - the target is a percentage of checks.

/help/designer/service-page
/help/api-testing/monitors-and-alerts
/help/designer/service-reports