Provider SLAs

Your services depend on third parties: the website hosting, the cloud, a SaaS, the bank's API. Each one promised you a minimum availability in its contract (its SLA) and, often, a credit if it falls short. The Providers section measures each provider with your own monitors and tells you every month whether it met its SLA and how much you can claim.

It is included in the Professional and Agency plans and for companies managed by TECDEX. Company administrators and operators add and edit providers; readers can see the reports.

Example

Your hosting promised 99.9% monthly availability. Its contract says: below 99.9% it refunds 10% of the fee; below 99%, 25%. You pay it 500 USD a month.

  • In a 30-day month your site was down for 2 hours in total: availability 99.72%.
  • With 99.9%, 43 min 12 s of downtime were allowed: it did not meet the SLA.
  • 99.72% is below 99.9% but not below 99%: 10% of the fee is due, 50 USD.

How to add a provider

  1. Go to Providers and open Add a provider.
  2. Provider and contract: the provider's name, the service it supplies and the contract or purchase order number (optional; shown in the report).
  3. Commitment and credits: the committed SLA in %, the monthly fee and its currency (optional) and the contract's credit tiers, one row per tier: "if it falls below 99.9% → credit of 10% of the fee". If the contract grants no credits, leave the rows empty: you will see whether it meets the SLA, without a credit calculation.
  4. Which monitors measure it: tick the monitors of the services that depend on that provider. For the hosting, your website's monitor; for the bank's API, that API's monitor.
  5. Save. The list shows each provider's result for the month: committed, measured, whether it meets the SLA and the estimated credit.

How it is calculated

provider availability = (measured time − downtime) / measured time × 100

measured time    = the month − scheduled maintenance of those monitors − periods without measurement
downtime         = union of the outages of the ticked monitors
allowed downtime = measured time × (100 − committed SLA) / 100
  • Union of outages: if two of the provider's monitors are down at the same time, that time counts once.
  • What counts as downtime is the same as in How we calculate availability: slowness is not downtime.
  • Met if the month's availability is equal to or above the committed SLA.
  • Credit: among the tiers whose threshold is above the availability, the one with the largest credit applies. With a monthly fee, the amount is fee × credit / 100.
  • The current month shows partial figures, up to today. Chile time.

Reference values for a 30-day month:

  • 99% allows 7 h 12 min of downtime.
  • 99.5% allows 3 h 36 min.
  • 99.9% allows 43 min 12 s.
  • 99.95% allows 21 min 36 s.
  • 99.99% allows 4 min 19 s.

Report and evidence

Each provider has a monthly report: result, downtime and allowed downtime, credit and the list of outages with the part that counts for the SLA. It can be downloaded as PDF, CSV or a ZIP package. Each file includes source, period, time zone and a SHA-256 fingerprint so the provider can verify it has not been altered. To claim, send them the month's PDF.

Deactivating

If you stop working with a provider, deactivate it: it is no longer measured or counted in the totals, but its data is kept and you can reactivate it at any time. Nothing is deleted. You can have up to 50 active providers.

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