Documentation / Platform glossary / Service Level Agreement
A service level agreement is the contractual commitment a provider makes about service performance — typically availability, response times, and support responsiveness — together with how it is measured and what remedy applies when it is missed. Without a measurement definition and a remedy, a stated number is not an SLA.
Three terms are routinely conflated. A service level indicator is the thing measured, such as the proportion of successful requests. A service level objective is the internal target for that indicator. A service level agreement is the external, contractual promise, usually set looser than the internal objective so that missing the target is not automatically a breach.
An SLA is only as good as its measurement definition. "99.9% uptime" is ambiguous until the agreement states what counts as downtime, who measures it, over what window, and what is excluded. Scheduled maintenance windows and degraded-but-available performance are the usual exclusions, and they can absorb a large share of real user impact.
The remedy also matters. Most SaaS SLAs provide service credits proportional to the miss, which compensates for the subscription cost rather than the business impact. Credits are typically capped and often require the customer to submit a claim within a defined period.
The SLA is where availability stops being an aspiration and becomes an obligation. It is also the clearest signal of how a provider thinks about reliability: a narrow definition with broad exclusions and a low credit cap describes a different posture than a broad definition with meaningful remedies.
For an evaluator, the useful questions are what is excluded, how downtime is measured, and whether credits require a claim.
QueryTek documents SLA vocabulary so teams can separate indicators, objectives, and contractual commitments when comparing providers. Specific QueryTek availability commitments, measurement definitions, and remedies are established in the customer agreement rather than stated in public documentation.
