SLA (service level agreement)
A contract that defines availability, response and fix times per priority, and what happens when they are missed.
An SLA turns support from goodwill into numbers: a support window, priorities, response time (when work starts) and resolution time (a workaround or a fix), plus a reserve of hours and the price of hours above it. Availability is often stated as a percentage; 99.5% of a 30-day month allows about 3.6 hours of downtime.
Related terms
- Runbook: A short document that tells someone else how to run a system: where it lives, how to deploy, how to recover.
- LLM observability: Tracing every model call with inputs, outputs, latency, tokens, cost and the user outcome.
- Fixed price: A contract where scope and price are agreed up front and the vendor carries the risk.
