Understanding and monitoring SLAs

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is part of an explicit or implicit contract attesting to certain service quality metrics and expectations. Violation of some of these could result in penalties, fines, and loss of reputation. There is usually a cost and service quality tradeoff. So, it is important to articulate the SLA requirements of each use case and describe how it will be measured and tracked so that there is no ambiguity of whether it was honored or violated. There should also be clear guidance on how SLA violations are reported and the obligations and consequences on behalf of the service provider to remedy or compensate for the breach.

There are several types of SLA, and common ones include metrics for system availability, system response time, customer satisfaction as measured by Net Promoter Score (NPS), support tickets raised over a period of time, defect/error tickets and the response time to address them, and security incidents. It is...