3 September 2026LANTEK Computers
A service level agreement is meant to convert a vague promise of good service into something measurable. Most of the ones we read do half of that job, and the half they leave out is the half a client cares about.
Every figure used below is an illustration of a structure rather than anybody’s commitment, including ours.
Response is not resolution
The distinction that matters more than all the others.
Response time is how long until somebody acknowledges the ticket. In many agreements this can be satisfied by an automated email. An hour-response SLA can therefore be met while nothing has happened.
Resolution time is how long until the problem is fixed. This is what the client thinks they are buying and it is frequently absent, or present as a target rather than a commitment.
There is a legitimate reason for the asymmetry: a provider cannot promise to fix something whose cause they do not yet know, and some problems depend on a vendor or a courier. A provider who commits to fix everything within four hours regardless is either pricing for the worst case or will find a reason to decline.
What a good agreement does instead is commit to response, commit to a time by which somebody with the right skills is actively working on it, and commit to communication intervals until it is closed. That third one is the sleeper: most dissatisfaction with IT support is not about how long a fix took, it is about not knowing what was happening.
The clauses to read carefully
How priority is decided, and by whom
Every SLA has severity levels with different times attached. The question is who classifies an incident.
If the provider decides unilaterally, then every commitment is subject to their judgement about how urgent your problem is. The workable arrangement is agreed definitions in the contract, written in business terms rather than technical ones, and a route to escalate a classification you disagree with.
Good definitions describe impact: an entire site unable to work, a single user unable to work, a department degraded but functioning, a request that is not urgent. Bad definitions describe technology, because then you are arguing about whether a mail outage is a server problem or a network problem while nobody can send anything.
When the clock runs
Business hours, and what those are. Whether the clock pauses while the provider is waiting for information from you, which is reasonable in principle and can be used to pause a clock indefinitely by asking a question. Whether it pauses while waiting on a third party. And what happens to a ticket logged at ten minutes before close.
Also: what counts as logging a ticket? If the SLA only applies to tickets raised through a portal, then a telephone call at eight in the morning may not have started any clock at all.
What happens when it is missed
Most SLAs specify times and no consequence, which makes them a statement of intent.
Realistically, a small business is not going to litigate over a missed response, and a service credit of a few percent of a monthly fee changes nobody’s behaviour. So the useful thing to look for is not a penalty. It is a defined escalation: at what point does this stop being one engineer’s ticket and become somebody senior’s problem, and who is that person?
An agreement naming an escalation contact with a direct number is worth more than one promising a credit.
Exclusions
Read this list, because it is where the agreement is really defined. Common and often reasonable: third party outages, anything caused by changes you made yourself, equipment past end of support, and problems with software the provider did not supply.
The ones worth negotiating: an exclusion for equipment you own but that they recommended, and any exclusion broad enough to cover most of what actually breaks.
Reporting
An SLA with no reporting cannot be verified. You should receive periodic figures on volumes, response and resolution against target, and what recurred.
That last column is the valuable one. Recurring tickets are the signal that something is being fixed repeatedly rather than solved, and a provider who reports on it is a provider paying attention.
What is usually missing and should not be
These are the commitments we most often find absent, and each is more useful than a tighter response time.
Communication intervals. How often you will be updated while something is open, by severity. Cheap to promise, transforms the experience.
A named escalation route. Who to ring when the normal channel is not working, with a number.
Restore commitments. Backup features in the inclusions and rarely in the SLA. What is the commitment to restore a deleted file, or a mailbox? See RPO and RTO for how to frame the ask.
Onboarding and offboarding turnaround. A new starter needs to work on their first morning. A leaver’s access needs closing the day they go, which is a security matter as much as an administrative one.
Proactive commitments. Almost all SLAs describe reactive work. What is committed on patching cycles, restore testing, and access reviews? A managed service is meant to be about the things that do not become tickets, and if none of that is in the agreement you are contracting for reactions. Which is the whole argument in what a managed IT service should include.
Three questions that reveal more than the document
Show me last month’s SLA report. Either they produce one or the SLA is not measured.
What was your worst miss in the last quarter, and what did you change? Everybody misses sometimes. The answer tells you whether misses are examined or absorbed.
Who classifies severity, and can I challenge it? Back to the clause that governs everything else.
The honest summary
An SLA cannot make a provider good. It can make expectations explicit, which prevents most disputes, and it can give you a defined route when something is going badly.
Prefer clear definitions, honest exclusions and a named escalation over impressive numbers with a paragraph of qualifications underneath. A four hour response you can rely on beats a one hour response that is satisfied by a robot.
Our plans are on Service Plans. If you have an agreement in front of you and want to know what it actually commits to, send it over and we will read it with you.