Error budgets need clean events before they need dashboards
Burn rates collapse when duplicate fires and missing properties pollute the reliability stream.
Teams adopt error budgets with good intentions, then watch the budget thrash because the same failure fires three times under slightly different event names. Application analytics for reliability only works when identity, severity, and service boundaries stay consistent.
Before you tune burn-rate alerts, audit the event dictionary. Collapse synonyms, require a stable `service` property, and document which client retries should not inflate the error count. Clean inputs make modest dashboards more useful than ornate ones.
Once the stream is trustworthy, budgets become a conversation tool instead of a source of argument in the war room.