Service Level Agreement (SLA) Overview

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a contract between two organizations or two departments within an organization that outlines the technical support, network support, hardware/software, and Internet support that will or will not be provided. It defines the relationship and boundaries between the two organizations/departments.

There are a lot of examples of SLAs on the Internet and I reviewed several. Listed below are a couple of examples I found that I thought was fairly comprehensive and yet are user-friendly enough to not overwhelm the average user who needs to know, "Who do I call, what support is provided," etc.?

Although a SLA is bound to have some technical jargon in it, as it is a technical service level agreement, I think it's very important to be sure that the average user can easily obtain the information they need to resolve their technical problems as quickly as possible. I can even see how it might be useful to have full SLA between the organizations/departments describing everything fully, including the technical jargon that may be necessary. But then, it would make sense to have a simpler SLA that covers everything needed, but also is easy to read.

One of the articles I came across while researching Educational SLAs was SLA Definitions and Solutions by Lynn Greiner and Lauren Gibbons Paul, August 2007. The authors recommended asking the following questions when developing an SLA.

  • What is an SLA?
  • Why do I need SLAs?
  • Who provides the SLA?
  • What's in an SLA?
  • What are key components of an SLA?
  • What aobut indemnification?
  • Is an SLA transferrable?
  • How can I verify service levels?
  • What kind of metrics should be monitored?
  • What should I consider when selecting metrics for my SLA?
  • What uptime provisions are typical for network providers?
  • When should we review our SLAs?

I thought all of these were very good questions and would be helpful for someone who isn't very familiar with SLAs.

References