SLA (Service Level Agreement)

A service level agreement is an agreement between the service providers and the customer. SLAs commonly refer to measurements made to understand how the service is received by the customer, and they are of interest to the service provider and the customer alike. In Paragon Active Assurance, all metrics related to service degradation are transformed into errored seconds (ES) by setting appropriate thresholds for the metrics.

The level of SLA fulfillment given in monitoring results is calculated as 100 – ES (%). With the default SLA thresholds in Paragon Active Assurance, we obtain the following:

  • If 100 – ES ≥ 99.95%, that is, if the ES percentage is below 0.05%, the service level is classified as SLA Good (green SLA icon icon-dot-green).

  • If 99.5% ≤ 100 – ES < 99.95%, that is, if the ES percentage is in the range 0.05% … 0.5%, the service level is classified as SLA Acceptable (orange SLA icon icon-dot-orange).

  • If 100 – ES < 99.5%, the service level is classified as SLA Bad (red SLA icon icon-dot-red), and you should consider taking immediate action to locate and solve the problem. For example, an ES percentage of 1% equates to an SLA fulfillment of 99%, which is in the SLA Bad region.

These SLA icons are presented on the dashboard.

The SLA icons provide a quick way to understand if the service level is high enough, or if there are quality issues degrading the service, and if so what is causing these problems. SLA thresholds set in Paragon Active Assurance should of course correspond to what is set down in the actual SLA, or to other agreed SLA levels, in order for measurement results to be accepted by all parties. How to change the default SLA levels is described on this page.

Note

The coloring of the SLA icons is determined entirely by the above criteria and is thus independent of the color range used for errored seconds.