SLA

Definition

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a formal contract between a service provider and its customers that defines the minimum acceptable level of service — typically expressed as an uptime percentage. Breaching an SLA usually triggers financial penalties such as service credits.

In depth

SLAs sit at the top of the SLA → SLI → SLO hierarchy. An SLA is the external commitment (99.9% uptime per month), the SLO is the internal target teams aim to achieve with headroom (99.95%), and the SLI is the metric used to measure whether the target is being met (successful request rate). The gap between SLO and SLA is intentional buffer: if the internal SLO is breached but the SLA is not, the team investigates without triggering customer penalties. SLAs typically cover availability, response time, and support response times. obseria.io provides SLA-ready reporting dashboards that track SLI measurements against SLO targets across rolling 30-day windows.

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