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Cloud & DevOps

What is Service Level Agreement?

Quick answer

A contract between a service provider and a customer that defines expected service quality, such as uptime, and what happens if it is not met.

Service Level Agreement, explained

A service level agreement, or SLA, sets measurable commitments. Common terms include availability, for example 99.9 percent uptime per month, response times for support tickets, and time to resolve outages. SLAs usually describe how performance is measured and what compensation applies if targets are missed, often service credits rather than refunds.

For example, a restaurant using a cloud point of sale system would want to know the provider's uptime commitment, support hours, and what happens if the system fails during a Friday dinner rush. Inside technology teams, related terms include service level objectives, which are internal targets, and service level indicators, which are the metrics being measured. Reading SLA exclusions is important, since planned maintenance and certain failures are often not covered.

Related terms

Managed IT Services

Outsourcing day-to-day IT management, such as support, security, backups, and updates, to an external provider for a regular fee.

Site Reliability Engineering

An approach, known as SRE, that applies software engineering to operations to keep systems reliable, scalable, and efficient.

Uptime

The percentage of time a system, website, or service is operational and available to users.

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