General Concepts

What is SLA?

Definition

Service Level Agreement — a contract defining the expected level of service, uptime guarantees, and remedies if those levels are not met.

Understanding SLA

SLAs are commitments from subscription services about reliability and performance. Common SLA metrics include uptime percentage (e.g., 99.9% means ~8.7 hours downtime per year), response time for support tickets, and data recovery time. Enterprise subscriptions typically include formal SLAs with financial credits for breaches.

Consumer services usually have informal SLAs in their terms of service. Understanding SLAs is important for business-critical subscriptions — compare uptime guarantees when choosing between cloud providers or business tools.

Related Terms

Subscription

A recurring payment arrangement where a customer pays at regular intervals to access a product or service.

Cloud Computing

The delivery of computing services — including servers, storage, databases, and software — over the internet on a subscription or pay-per-use basis.

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