• 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 about indemnification?
• Is an SLA Transferable?
• 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 Service Providers?
• When Should We Review our SLAs?

Should the service provider be acquired by, or merge with another company, the customer may expect that its SLA will continue to be in force, but this may not be the fact. The agreement may have to be renegotiated. Make no assumptions, however bear in mind that the new owner will not want to alienate existing customers, so may decide to honor existing SLAs.

Most service providers make statistics available, often on a Web portal. There, customers can check whether SLAs are being met, and whether they're entitled to service credits or other penalties as laid out in the SLA.

However, for mission-critical services where the business itself is at risk if service levels are not met, it may be worth considering using a third-party monitoring organization or an SLA management tool to supplement the vendor's data. The extra expense of these additional methods can be worthwhile for critical services.

Many items can be monitored as part of an SLA, but the scheme should be kept as simple as possible to avoid confusion and excessive cost on either side. In choosing metrics, examine your operation and decide what is most important. The more complex the monitoring (and associated remedy) scheme, the less likely it is to be effective, since no-one will have time to properly analyze the data. When in doubt, opt for ease of collection of metric data; automated systems are best, since it is unlikely that costly manual collection of metrics will be reliable.

Depending on the service, the types of metric to monitor may include:
Service availability: the amount of time the service is available for use. This may be measured by time slot, with, for example, 99.5 percent availability required between the hours of 8 am and 6 pm, and more or less availability specified during other times. E-commerce operations typically have extremely aggressive SLAs at all times; 99.999 percent uptime is a not uncommon requirement for a site that generates millions of dollars an hour.
Defect rates: Counts or percentages of errors in major deliverables. Production failures such as incomplete backups and restores, coding errors/rework, and missed deadlines may be included in this category.
Technical quality: in outsourced application development, measurement of technical quality by commercial analysis tools that examine factors such as program size and coding defects.
Security: In these hyper-regulated times, application and network security breaches can be costly. Measuring controllable security measures such as anti-virus updates and patching is key in proving all reasonable preventive measures were taken, in the event of an incident.

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