What is a Service Level Agreement

Information (SLA)
A Service Level Agreement is an important document that is used to define the level of a
service that exists between a service provider and their customer.

The agreement is generally in expressed in a simple language so that it can be clearly

understood by the customer. The document may also include more technical terms for
defining the service. The Service Level Agreement is often part of a wider service contract.

A Service Level Agreement can either be an informal contract between parties or a legally
binding contract.

The SLA may address several areas including the availability of the service, the performance
of the service, how it will operate, priorities, responsibilities of involved parties, guarantees
and warranties.

As well as defining key areas, the Service Level Agreement may also specify a level of
service, including targets and a minimum level that can be reached.

Some of the common uses for a Service Level Agreement would be for telecom companies,
IT service providers, Internet Service Providers (ISP) and outsourcing.

Types of Service Level Agreement

As a Service Level Agreement can be used in many areas, there are several types of SLA that
can be used, including:

- Customer SLA: This is where there is an agreement with an individual customer

- Service SLA: This service agreement is for every customer making use of the
services being provided

- Multi-level SLA: This is a combination of levels with the purpose of addressing

multiple sets of customers

- Corporate SLA: This covers all Service Level Management (SLM) issues

- Customer Level SLA: Covers all SLM issues that apply to a particular group of
customers

- Service Level SLA: This covers all SLM issues that apply to specific services

What are SLAs and why are they important?

Paul Randal - MSFT
4 Mar 2007 2:52 PM

(In the UK now hanging out with Kimberly and Tony Rogerson before teaching a Masterclass
tomorrow in Reading. Then it's off to Copenhagen for SQL Server Open World, with a little
R&R in London beforehand and Copenhagen afterwards, before we fly back to the US on
Sunday. The weather here is actually better than in Seattle!)
I've had a bunch of feedback from the survey I sent out (still need more before posting any
statistics though) and various things have jumped out at me. The most worrying is that many
people either don't know what their SLAs are or have no idea whether they can meet them.
Here are some questions around SLAs - if you can't answer YES! to all of them, then you may
be in trouble.
Do you know what an SLA is?
SLA = Service Level Agreement. SLAs are agreements between you and your customers. If
you're a DBA, then your customer is typically the company for whom you work. Examples of
SLAs are:
1. In the event of a corruption, or other disaster, the maximum amount of
data loss is the last 15 minutes of transactions.
2. In the event of a corruption, or other disaster, the maximum amount of
downtime the application can tolerate is 20 minutes.

Usually, it's a combination of SLAs such as those above.

Do you know why SLAs are important?
Here's the catch - an SLA is really more than just an agreement between you and your
customers - it's more like a contract that you're obligated to meet. This means that if you're a
DBA with zero-downtime and zero-data loss SLAs, you need to make sure that in the event
of a corruption you can actually meet those SLAs. The obvious thing is that if the SLAs
cannot be met then the business will suffer downtime and data loss. The not so obvious thing
is that if you're the one who agreed to the SLAs in the first place, and when the disaster
strikes, the capabilities of the system are far below the SLA's requirements, then you could
lose your job - resume/CV time - I've heard of it happening...
Do you know your SLAs?
You have to know what your SLAs are so you can make sure the system can meet them.
Several DBAs I discussed this with don't know what their business' SLAs are, even though
they are responsible for making sure they are met. I find this astounding - how can you sign
up for meeting an SLA when you don't know that the SLA is? Especially if failing to meet the
SLA could lead to resume/CV time...
Do you think you can meet your SLAs?
The other reason to know your SLAs, of course, is so that you can correctly architect your
system to meet them. There are a bunch of technologies you can use and strategies you can
employ to work towards meeting your SLAs (well beyond the scope of this blog post but will
be covered through the year). If you find that you can't meet your SLAs, you need to pushback on your management - otherwise you're setting yourself up for trouble when a disaster
occurs and you can't meet the SLAs - you'll be held responsible.
Do you know you can meet your SLAs?
Your disaster recovery plan looks great on paper - but have you actually tried it? I know of
one company that has a 15 minute downtime SLA for a 300+GB database but the DBA is
relying on clusters to provide that for him. That won't work if the database is corrupt
(remember a failover cluster has a single point of failure in its shared-nothing configuration the disks) and needs to be restored from the last full backup... Another company I know of
relies on database mirroring to failover in the event of a disaster but has never tried it to see if
their application fails over gracefully... You have to make sure you've practiced recovering
from a disaster before the first real disaster happens - you'll be amazed at the little things that
are discovered (e.g. if the on-site backups are bad, how long will it take to get the offsite
copies brought in-house from the off-site location 100 miles away? Can you still meet your
15 minute downtime SLA in that case?)
Summary
As you can can see from my short list of questions and answers above, its vital that you
understand your SLAs and know that you can meet them - your business (and job!) may
depend on it. If you're having trouble, drop me a line (prandal@microsoft.com) and I'll see
what I can do to help.

PS Don't forget to checkout the .NET Rocks! show tomorrow!