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What does a service-level agreement do?
An SLA establishes what a provider has committed to deliver and how the parties will determine whether it did so. It may be a customer contract with an external provider or an internal agreement between business units. The specific agreement—not the general meaning of “SLA”—sets the binding scope, measurement rules, and consequences.
Availability is a common subject, but an SLA can also set expectations for response time, resolution time, delivery, performance, recovery time, or durability. AWS describes these as common types of service measures; the individual agreement controls which apply and how they are evaluated (AWS overview of SLAs).
How do SLI, SLO, and SLA differ?
| Term | Meaning | Example role |
|---|---|---|
| SLI (service-level indicator) | A measurement of a service property. | Availability, error rate, or throughput measured over time. |
| SLO (service-level objective) | A target for an SLI over a defined period. | An operating team’s target for service availability. |
| SLA (service-level agreement) | A commitment to a customer or other party, commonly linking a target and period to a remedy if the commitment is missed. | A contractual availability commitment with a defined service-credit process. |
In short: an SLI is the measure, an SLO is the target, and an SLA is the commitment and its consequences. Google Cloud’s SRE guidance describes an SLA as a promise that an availability SLO will meet a level over a period, with a penalty if it does not (Google Cloud’s SRE explanation).
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A provider’s SLA percentage should not automatically become the target for your own application. Your service also depends on your code, architecture, dependencies, and operating practices; define internal SLOs around the reliability your users need. Microsoft explains this distinction in its guidance on reading SLAs.
What does an SLA commonly include?
Agreements vary, but these elements help make a commitment understandable and assessable:
- Parties, term, and covered service: who is bound, when the agreement applies, and which service or tier is included.
- Scope: the covered operations, endpoints, features, locations, or workloads—and what falls outside that scope.
- Targets and metrics: measurable commitments for availability, response, delivery, resolution, performance, or other service characteristics.
- Definitions and calculation: what counts as a valid request, failure, downtime, and measurement period, and how the result is calculated.
- Responsibilities and prerequisites: configurations, customer actions, or operating conditions required for the commitment to apply.
- Exceptions and operating procedures: maintenance rules, exclusions, escalation paths, disaster-recovery terms, and reporting.
- Remedies and claims: what happens if a target is missed, such as a service credit, and how and by when a customer must request it.
A headline target is only one part of the agreement. Definitions, preconditions, exclusions, and claim procedures can materially affect whether an incident counts and what remedy is available. AWS also identifies items such as service descriptions, security standards, disaster recovery, and tracking and reporting as common SLA components.
How should you interpret an uptime commitment?
Do not judge an availability percentage by itself. Read the measurement rules and scope alongside it; the same outage can be counted differently under different agreements.
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- Availability and downtime: how the agreement defines each, including whether measurement is based on elapsed time or valid requests.
- Scope and aggregation: which service, features, regions, or customer resources count, and whether results are calculated per resource, account, or another unit.
- Measurement period: the interval used to assess the target and how billing-period boundaries affect it.
- Prerequisites and exclusions: required configurations or customer behavior, scheduled maintenance, and events or features excluded from the calculation.
- Remedy process: whether a credit is automatic or must be claimed, and the agreement’s deadline and evidence requirements.
A service credit is a contractual remedy, not a guarantee that users will avoid disruption or that every business loss will be compensated. Use a provider SLA as one input to resilience planning, alongside your own SLOs and analysis of likely failure modes. Combining provider availability percentages can also mislead when their scopes, exclusions, or failure assumptions differ.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What are the main types of SLA?
AWS describes three common structures. They differ by the scope of coverage and how service terms or responsibilities are organized; none is universally best.
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| Type | Coverage scope | What it combines or defines |
|---|---|---|
| Customer-level SLA | Terms tailored to one customer. | The service commitments and conditions applicable to that customer. |
| Service-level SLA | A standard service commitment applicable to multiple customers using a service. | Terms for a particular service, rather than a distinct agreement for each customer. |
| Multi-level SLA | Layered coverage. | Different levels of terms, such as organization-wide, customer-specific, or service-specific conditions. |
The labels are useful ways to describe structure, not substitutes for reading the actual contract. The agreement determines which terms apply when layers overlap.
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