Service Level Agreement (SLA)

📄 Documentation 🔒 Confidential 🌐 v2.4

1. Overview & Scope

This Service Level Agreement (SLA) defines the service expectations, performance metrics, and support commitments provided by That Is A Q to its enterprise and growth-tier clients. It outlines measurable targets for system availability, support response times, incident resolution, and service continuity.

This SLA applies to all managed infrastructure, hosted applications, cloud deployments, and ongoing maintenance services delivered under active client contracts. It does not replace but complements the Master Services Agreement (MSA) and Statement of Work (SOW) executed between both parties.

📌 Note Metrics are calculated monthly based on UTC business hours unless otherwise specified. Quarterly SLA reports are provided automatically via the client portal.

2. Uptime & Availability

That Is A Q guarantees a minimum monthly uptime of 99.9% for all production environments under our managed services. Uptime is calculated as:

  • Uptime % = (Total Minutes in Month − Planned Downtime − Unplanned Downtime) / Total Minutes in Month × 100
  • Measurement is performed via independent third-party monitoring (UptimeRobot / Datadog) with 1-minute interval checks.
⚠️ Important Scheduled maintenance windows are excluded from uptime calculations provided proper notice is given. Third-party dependency outages (e.g., AWS, Stripe, Cloudflare) are tracked but may trigger force majeure clauses if beyond our control.

3. Support Tiers & Response Times

Support requests are categorized by severity. Response times represent the maximum duration before a qualified engineer acknowledges and begins triage. Resolution targets are best-effort and depend on incident complexity.

Severity Definition Response Time Resolution Target Hours Covered
Critical (P1) Complete system outage, data loss, or security breach affecting core operations 15 minutes 4 hours 24/7
High (P2) Major feature degradation, performance bottleneck, or partial outage 1 hour 8 hours 24/7
Medium (P3) Non-critical bug, minor UI/UX issue, or feature request 4 hours 3 business days Mon–Fri, 9AM–6PM EST
Low (P4) Documentation updates, cosmetic fixes, or general inquiries 1 business day 5 business days Mon–Fri, 9AM–6PM EST

4. Maintenance & Planned Downtime

Planned maintenance is conducted quarterly to apply security patches, infrastructure upgrades, and performance optimizations.

  • Notice Period: Minimum 72 hours via email and portal notifications
  • Windows: Typically scheduled on Saturdays between 02:00–06:00 UTC
  • Duration: Maximum 4 hours per window unless extended by client agreement
  • Rollback Protocol: Automated rollback triggers if health checks fail within 30 minutes of deployment

Emergency security patches may bypass the notice period but will be communicated immediately via emergency alert channels.

5. Incident Management & Escalation

All incidents follow a structured escalation path to ensure timely resolution and stakeholder visibility:

  1. Tier 1 (Support Engineers): Initial triage, log analysis, and basic remediation (0–30 min)
  2. Tier 2 (Senior Engineers / Architects): Deep debugging, infrastructure scaling, patch deployment (30 min–2 hrs)
  3. Tier 3 (Engineering Leads / CTO): Complex system failures, data integrity issues, vendor coordination (2–6 hrs)
  4. Executive Escalation: Triggered automatically if P1 incident exceeds 4 hours without resolution path

Post-incident reports (PIRs) are delivered within 48 hours of resolution, including root cause analysis (RCA), impact assessment, and preventive measures.

6. SLA Credits & Remedies

If That Is A Q fails to meet the agreed uptime targets, clients are eligible for service credits applied to the next billing cycle. Credits are calculated as a percentage of the monthly managed services fee.

Monthly Uptime Service Credit Maximum Credit Cap
99.9% – 100.0% 0% —
99.5% – 99.89% 10% Up to 25% of monthly fee
99.0% – 99.49% 25% Up to 50% of monthly fee
<99.0% 50% Up to 100% of monthly fee

Credit requests must be submitted via the client portal within 30 days of the end of the affected billing month. Credits are non-refundable and cannot be exchanged for cash.

7. Exclusions & Limitations

The following scenarios are excluded from SLA guarantees and do not qualify for credits or expedited support:

  • Third-party service outages (AWS, GCP, Stripe, Twilio, etc.) beyond our mitigation scope
  • Client-initiated code deployments, configuration changes, or environment modifications
  • Security incidents caused by compromised client credentials, misconfigured access controls, or unpatched client-owned systems
  • Force majeure events (natural disasters, government actions, telecom infrastructure failures)
  • Beta, staging, or non-production environments
  • Issues resulting from non-compliance with documented architecture or deployment guidelines

8. Contact & Support

All SLA-related inquiries, incident reports, and credit requests should be directed through official channels:

🔔 Status Page Real-time system status, incident timelines, and maintenance schedules are publicly available at status.thatisaq.com.