IT glossary
SLA (Service Level Agreement)
An SLA, or service level agreement, is the part of an IT contract stating how quickly your provider responds to a problem, and what happens if they miss.
Most of them are written to be reassuring rather than useful. They are also one of the few parts of a proposal that can be compared like for like between providers, which makes them worth twenty minutes of proper reading.
The three things to actually check
Response or resolution? Almost every SLA commits to a response time, how long before a human acknowledges you. Very few commit to a resolution time, because honest providers cannot promise one for problems they have not seen yet. That is fair. What is not fair is a document that lets “response” mean an automated ticket confirmation. Ask what specifically counts as a response.
Which hours? “Four-hour response” behaves very differently under a business-hours clock than a round-the-clock one. If your support window is 8am to 6pm local time and something breaks at 4pm on Friday, a four-hour target under business hours lands on Monday morning. That may be perfectly acceptable, just know it before you sign, not afterwards.
What is the remedy? This is where most SLAs quietly deflate. The usual remedy for a missed target is a service credit: a small percentage of one month’s fee, which you often have to notice and claim yourself. For an organization paying a few thousand a month, that is not a meaningful incentive and it will not cover an afternoon of lost work.
Why it matters to you
Because the SLA is where expectations get set and where arguments later get settled. When a bad week happens, nobody wants to be discovering that “priority 1” was defined as a total site outage and your situation was a 2.
What to ask for instead of stronger numbers
A faster promised number is easy to write and hard to keep. More useful:
- The definitions of each priority level, with examples from your environment
- Actual average and 90th-percentile response times from the last quarter
- What happens on the third breach, not the first, an escalation path or a termination right is worth more than a credit
- Who you call when the ticket system itself is the thing that is down
The honest position
An SLA sets a floor, not a standard of care. It tells you what a provider is prepared to be held to on a bad day. Reference calls with clients who have had a bad day tell you considerably more.