Service Level Agreement

Response times, exclusions, escalation and the renewal window you will miss.

As specified

The agreement you signed

Every managed service provider publishes a service level agreement. Ours is the same as theirs, except we wrote down what we actually do.

This page is the binding version. If a salesperson told you something warmer, that conversation was not the agreement. This is the agreement.

Response targets

What our response times actually mean

Response time is when we acknowledge your ticket. It is not when we look at it, and it is certainly not when we fix it. Those are different products.

P1 Critical Everything is down	4 business hours to acknowledge. Acknowledgement means an automated email with a ticket number.
P2 High Something important is down	8 business hours. We will ask you to restart it, then close the ticket.
P3 Normal Something is broken	2 business days. We reserve the right to reclassify this as P4.
P4 Low Anything you reported	We will get to it. This is not a commitment.
P5 Feature request A good idea you had	Logged. Never read again.

How severity is decided

By us. You may propose a severity on the form. We will correct it.

Business hours

When are we available?

Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm, excluding the following.

Lunch, which is 11:30 to 1:30 and is not negotiable.
Fridays after 2pm, when the team is in a planning session.
The week between Christmas and New Year, in full.
Any day on which a major vendor certification exam is scheduled.
Days when the weather in our city is notable.

After-hours support is available under your agreement at a multiple of the standard rate. The multiple is defined in Schedule C. You do not have Schedule C.

Uptime

What does 99.9% uptime guarantee?

It guarantees that we measured 99.9% uptime.

Availability is calculated monthly, excluding scheduled maintenance, emergency maintenance, maintenance we later decide was necessary, carrier outages, power events, your equipment, your internet, your building, and any period during which the monitoring agent was not reporting.

After those exclusions, we have never missed the target. We would like you to notice that this is not the achievement it sounds like.

Service credits

If we miss the target, you may claim a credit equal to a portion of one month of fees. The claim must be submitted in writing within five days of the outage you did not know had a target attached to it. Credits are applied to future invoices and cannot be paid out, which means the remedy for us failing to provide service is more of our service.

Scope

What is not included?

The following are outside your agreement and billed at project rates.

Anything new	If it was not on the asset list at signing, it is a project.
Anything old	Equipment past end of support is excluded. We will still bill to look at it.
Anything a vendor touches	Coordinating with your line-of-business vendor is consulting, not support.
Anything a user caused	Determined by us, after the fact, in our notes.
Moves, adds and changes	A new hire is a project. A departing employee is also a project.
Documentation	Available at any time, for a fee, in a format of our choosing.

Escalation

How do I escalate?

Reply to the ticket with the word URGENT. This moves the ticket to the top of the queue, where it will be seen by the same technician who was already not working on it.

If that does not resolve it, ask for a supervisor.
The supervisor is the technician. We are a small team.
If that does not resolve it, ask for the account manager.
The account manager will schedule a call to discuss the ticket. The call is billable.
On the call, the account manager will ask you to open a ticket.

Escalation does not change the response target. Nothing changes the response target.

Term

How do I leave?

Your agreement renews automatically for successive thirty-six month terms unless you give written notice of non-renewal not less than ninety days and not more than one hundred and twenty days before the end of the current term.

That is a thirty day window, once every three years. Most clients discover it four days after it closes. We do not send a reminder, and we are not required to.

On termination you are entitled to your data. Extraction, formatting and transfer are a project. Administrative credentials are released once the final invoice clears. We hold the documentation, the monitoring configuration and the passwords until then, which is the part people wish they had read.

The annoyingly correct part

A real service level agreement should state resolution targets and not just response targets, define severity by business impact rather than by provider discretion, list exclusions in full, cap the notice window at thirty days rather than ninety, and require credential handover on termination regardless of billing disputes. If your current agreement does none of that, it was written by the provider, for the provider. Ours certainly was.