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The headline uptime percentage is only the starting point of a data-center service-level agreement (SLA). Before signing, identify exactly which facility, power feed, device, interconnect, and network path are covered; require a published uptime formula and clock; and negotiate separate commitments for latency, packet loss, packet delivery, jitter, and throughput. A 99.9% promise can be useful for one service and almost irrelevant to an application whose failure occurs on an excluded carrier or last-mile segment.

Start with the service boundary, not the percentage

An SLA is a contractual definition of the service a provider will operate and the result it promises to measure. In a data-center agreement, “availability” might apply to a building, a managed network, a cross-connect, an interconnection service, a cloud region, or an end-to-end application path. Those are different commitments.

Draw the production path before reviewing the SLA: application host, rack or cloud service, hypervisor, power feeds, switches, cross-connects, provider backbone, carrier circuits, internet or private-cloud edge, last-mile carrier, and your users. Mark every segment owned by someone other than the SLA provider. A provider can meet its facility or interconnect target while a partner circuit, local loop, or your own router is unavailable.

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Amazon Web Services states that an SLA describes how a service is provided and operated, but asks whether the entire hybrid network must meet one uptime target. Its hybrid-connectivity guidance warns that the rest of a hybrid network may not inherit the selected service’s SLA. Treat that warning as a design requirement: the contract should name the covered service and its dependency boundary in topology terms.

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Questions that expose an incomplete scope

  • Is the commitment for the building, a power feed, a cage, a device pair, a virtual service, a circuit, or an end-to-end path?
  • Are redundant paths both included, and does traffic have to fail over in a prescribed way for the SLA to apply?
  • Which regions, metros, availability zones, data centers, ports, and interconnect types are covered?
  • Do partner carriers, cloud providers, cross-connect operators, and last-mile networks sit inside or outside the commitment?
  • Does a configuration error, capacity exhaustion, or customer-maintained device disqualify an incident?

What the published uptime figures actually mean

A percentage is meaningful only with its period, formula, outage threshold, and exclusions. Monthly uptime commonly uses a formula equivalent to (total minutes in the measurement period − qualifying downtime) ÷ total minutes in the measurement period. The contract must define whether the denominator is a calendar month, a billing month, or another interval, and which clock is authoritative.

For scale, a 30-day month contains 43,200 minutes. If every minute is eligible for measurement, 99.9% permits 43.2 minutes of downtime, 99.95% permits 21.6 minutes, and 99.99% permits 4.32 minutes. A provider may exclude maintenance, force majeure, customer actions, or short interruptions, so these are illustrations of the percentage—not a promise that all of those minutes are creditable.

Service or provider statement Published target or threshold How the event is defined
Google Cloud Network Connectivity Center At least 99.95% monthly uptime Downtime is when a properly configured hub cannot serve traffic between configured regional spokes.
Amazon Web Services Interconnect SLA 120 consecutive seconds Unavailability is complete inability to send or receive data for at least 120 consecutive seconds; the page was updated April 15, 2026.
Verizon managed data-center network 99.99% availability The addendum lists managed-network availability separately from its latency and packet-delivery measurements.
Google Cloud Standard Tier networking At least 99.9% good minutes per month A bad minute is loss of external connectivity to the virtual machine, defined as 100% packet loss; coverage ends after packets leave Google’s network. The target was described in a 2023 announcement.

These figures are not interchangeable. Network Connectivity Center measures traffic between configured regional spokes; Standard Tier measures a virtual machine’s external connectivity and stops at Google’s network edge; an Interconnect event must last 120 consecutive seconds; and Verizon’s figure concerns a managed data-center network. Compare the definitions, not just the number of nines.

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Outage thresholds change the result

Ask whether downtime accumulates from every failed second, every failed minute, or only an interruption longer than a stated threshold. A 119-second interruption may be treated differently from a 120-second interruption under an interconnect SLA. The contract should also explain whether several short events are added together, whether a failed health check must persist for a set number of samples, and how partial service is scored.

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Require separate commitments for connectivity quality

Availability answers “can traffic pass?” It does not answer whether traffic is fast, complete, or stable enough for your application. Put latency, packet loss, packet delivery, jitter, and throughput in their own schedule with measurable endpoints.

Latency

Define the direction (round trip or one way), protocol, packet size, test frequency, and endpoints. “Provider network latency” could mean two points inside a metro, while your users connect from another continent. State the permitted geography, such as site-to-site, region-to-region, or customer edge to provider edge. Require the statistic—average, median, 95th percentile, or maximum—and specify whether a monthly average can hide a severe daily spike.

Packet loss and packet delivery

Use an explicit ratio and sampling method. Verizon’s addendum describes packet-delivery measurement separately from availability, illustrating why a circuit can be reachable yet still violate a quality commitment. Google Cloud’s Standard Tier definition is stricter for its “bad minute”: 100% packet loss to the virtual machine. That definition does not automatically cover intermittent loss, loss after Google’s network, or loss on your access carrier.

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Jitter and throughput

Real-time voice, video, storage replication, and trading workloads need variation and capacity limits addressed. Specify whether jitter is measured as inter-packet-delay variation, what percentile is used, and the test packet size. Throughput needs a committed rate, burst allowance, direction, and test conditions; otherwise a nominal port speed says little about usable capacity during congestion.

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A practical metric schedule

  • Availability: qualifying downtime, monthly denominator, outage threshold, and service-health condition.
  • Latency: named source and destination, route or region, packet size, sampling interval, statistic, and threshold.
  • Packet loss: loss calculation, test method, minimum sample count, and whether partial loss qualifies.
  • Packet delivery: delivered-versus-sent definition and treatment of duplicates or reordered packets.
  • Jitter: calculation, percentile, and traffic class.
  • Throughput: committed rate, direction, burst rules, and congestion test window.

Define who measures an outage

Measurement is a contract term, not an afterthought. Identify the monitoring system, clock source, sampling interval, probe locations, and health checks. A provider’s internal dashboard may monitor a service edge while your failure occurs between that edge and your office.

Require both parties to retain synchronized evidence: incident start and end timestamps, affected components, alarm history, maintenance notices, route or circuit identifiers, packet-loss and latency samples, and the provider’s incident report. Ask for machine-readable exports, not only a monthly availability percentage. State how clock differences are reconciled and how a customer can challenge an omitted event.

For multi-provider paths, require dependency transparency. The provider should identify the carrier, partner, cross-connect, or cloud edge responsible for each handoff and explain whether that segment is measured, excluded, or subject to a pass-through commitment. Keep your own independent probes at the application edge and at each major handoff; they cannot expand contractual coverage, but they provide evidence when the provider’s boundary and your user experience diverge.

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Read maintenance and exclusion language line by line

Scheduled maintenance is often excluded, but the exclusion should have notice, duration, frequency, and emergency rules. A blanket exclusion for “maintenance” can erase the practical value of an uptime promise. Ask whether redundant maintenance must preserve service, whether an unannounced emergency window is treated differently, and whether maintenance during a declared incident counts as downtime.

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Other common exclusions include customer equipment, incorrect configuration, denial-of-service attacks, force majeure, carrier failures, and events outside the provider’s control. Each should identify the affected component and the evidence required. “Third-party network” should not be a universal escape clause if the provider selected, billed, or operated that network segment. Request a map of responsibility for every circuit and handoff.

Understand credits, caps, and the claim process

An SLA credit is usually a contract remedy rather than reimbursement for all business losses. Its practical value depends on the credit table, the service amount used as the base, monthly or annual caps, and whether credits expire. The agreement should state whether a credit applies automatically or requires a customer claim.

  1. Record the incident in your ticketing system with UTC timestamps, affected services, monitoring graphs, and user impact.
  2. Confirm that the event crosses the contractual outage threshold and is not excluded maintenance or a customer-caused condition.
  3. Submit the claim through the named portal or contract contact before the stated deadline, attaching the required incident number and evidence.
  4. Request the provider’s calculation: measurement period, qualifying minutes, exclusions, service-credit tier, and any cap already consumed.
  5. Track approval, credit application, and dispute dates. Preserve the provider’s incident report and your own measurements.

Check for sole-remedy language. If credits are the exclusive remedy, the agreement may limit your ability to seek other contractual relief for the same failure. Also check whether credits are the only remedy for latency or packet loss, whether repeated misses trigger termination rights, and whether chronic underperformance permits service migration without early-termination charges. Do not assume a high uptime target compensates for a low credit cap.

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Compare providers with the same questions

Use a comparison sheet that keeps unlike promises from looking equivalent. The following axes expose the differences that a marketing percentage hides:

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Comparison axis What to capture in the SLA
Covered scope and geography Facilities, devices, ports, regions, paths, partner circuits, and provider-edge boundaries.
Target and formula Percentage or threshold, measurement period, denominator, qualifying event, and clock source.
Outage and maintenance rules Minimum outage duration, aggregation of short events, notice, emergency maintenance, and redundancy requirements.
Connectivity quality Latency endpoints and percentile, packet-loss and packet-delivery method, jitter, and throughput conditions.
Exclusions and dependencies Customer actions, force majeure, carriers, cloud edges, last mile, and evidence required for each exclusion.
Monitoring and auditability Probe locations, sampling, clock synchronization, incident logs, raw exports, retention, and dispute process.
Credits and remedies Credit tiers, claim deadline, calculation base, caps, automatic versus customer-initiated claims, sole-remedy wording, and termination rights.

Ask every bidder to complete this sheet using its contract language. If a value cannot be stated, treat that omission as a negotiation item rather than assuming the most favorable interpretation.

Validate the SLA against your own architecture

Map the application’s end-to-end dependencies and identify the narrowest commitment. If your service needs two independent paths, verify that the SLA covers both and defines failover behavior. If users enter through a local carrier, an interconnect SLA that ends at a provider edge cannot guarantee their experience. If a cloud service measures only 100% packet loss, it may not address intermittent loss or high latency that still breaks transactions.

Before production, run a baseline using the same endpoints, packet sizes, and intervals that the contract specifies. Test normal operation, failover, maintenance, and restoration. Set internal alerts below the contractual threshold so your team can open a ticket before the claim deadline. Review the SLA after topology, carrier, region, or application changes; a new handoff can move the failure point outside the original commitment.

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Procurement checklist

  • Attach a topology diagram and mark every covered and excluded component.
  • State whether redundant paths, partner circuits, and last-mile links count toward the target.
  • Write the monthly formula, outage threshold, denominator, and authoritative clock.
  • Define scheduled and emergency maintenance, notice periods, and redundancy expectations.
  • Set latency, jitter, packet-loss, packet-delivery, and throughput targets where the workload needs them.
  • Name probe endpoints, geography, sampling, averaging, percentiles, and packet sizes.
  • Require incident logs, raw measurement exports, retention periods, and an audit or dispute path.
  • List every exclusion and the evidence needed to invoke it.
  • Specify claim deadlines, required attachments, credit caps, calculation base, and whether credits are automatic.
  • Explain sole-remedy, termination, chronic-failure, and migration provisions.
  • Keep independent monitoring for the end-to-end path and rehearse the claim procedure.

Bottom line

Choose the SLA whose measurement boundary matches the failure you need to prevent. A clearly defined 99.9% commitment with transparent evidence, meaningful quality metrics, and workable credits can protect an application better than a 99.99% headline that stops at a provider edge. Put the topology, formula, thresholds, exclusions, monitoring data, and remedy process in writing before comparing the number of nines.

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