Service level agreement
Also known as SLA
A contractual commitment to defined levels of availability or response, usually with a remedy when they are missed.
The details decide whether it means anything: what is measured, when the clock starts, what counts as a response versus a resolution, and what the remedy actually is. A credit worth a few percent of a monthly fee rarely reflects the cost of an outage.
Response time and resolution time are different promises, and vendors frequently commit only to the first.
Where this comes up
Service level agreement sits inside our networks and infrastructure work. If you are trying to work out what this means for your own environment rather than in the abstract, that is the page worth reading next, and a short call will get you a straight answer faster than either.