Top 6 Managed Service Provider SLA Metrics to Look For

Service level agreements (SLAs) between your organization and the managed service provider (MSP) that you’re contracting with can be crucial for managing expectations and setting the ground rules for engaging with them.

With a clearly-defined set of SLAs, you know what to expect from your MSP and have a clear list of service goals to which you can hold them accountable. When working with an MSP, it’s important to verify that their SLAs include relevant metrics that are clear-cut and enforceable.

In this blog, we’ll discuss why tracking SLAs is important and some of the top metrics to look for in an SLA document.

Why Do You Need an SLA with Your Managed Service Provider?

A service level agreement is a contract between a service provider and a customer that outlines the expected level of service. It specifies the performance metrics that will be used to measure the quality of service and details any consequences, such as penalties or remedial actions, if the service provider fails to meet these standards.

The SLA document in your service contract is what your MSP guarantees to you as the level of service that they’ll provide. If you don’t have an SLA, you don’t have a formal agreement on what kind of service the vendor should provide that you can hold them to. In that case, if a disagreement comes up later, you would have difficulty recovering any potential losses from the vendor’s failure to meet expectations (because they didn’t actually set any).

An SLA is your insurance against potential carelessness or neglect by a managed IT services provider. If they don’t measure up to the metrics outlined in the document, you can impose the appropriate penalties for the violation. A common penalty example is a fee reduction for failing to meet certain incident response deadlines or other important metrics.

It is incredibly important to review an MSP’s SLA documents when you engage with them for any kind of IT service to verify what they agree to provide to your company. If you’re expecting a specific type of service, but don’t see an SLA addressing it, then you may want to handle it before signing the service agreement!

Top 6 SLA Metrics to Look for in a Managed Service Provider

If you’re contracting with an MSP, there are a few different SLAs you’ll want to look for.

The specific SLAs you should expect may vary depending on the IT services you contracted for with an MSP, but some common examples to look for include:

1. Response Times

If something happens to your IT network or you send a request to your IT service provider, how quickly will they respond? Long response times can cause unacceptable delays in your managed IT services and affect productivity if they cause excessive downtime. 

For example, say that a critical IT asset, such as your main database, suffers a major failure that brings it offline. If your MSP’s response time metric to detect and respond to downtime is less than five minutes, then you can minimize the impact of the downtime. Note that this is a separate metric from time-to-remediation. Here, the MSP only guarantees how quickly they’ll start responding to a situation, not how quickly the situation will be resolved.

2. Time to Notification

How quickly will the service provider notify you of an IT incident and what they’re doing to resolve it (or if they’ve already resolved it)? With automated notification solutions, the time to notify for IT incidents should be extremely short—within an hour or less. MSPs that assemble manual incident reports might take longer to analyze the threat and provide details about their remediation efforts.

MSPs might only send immediate alerts for what they consider “major” IT incidents—leaving minor things like routine maintenance and software updates to a regular weekly report note saying something like “updated XYZ firewall tool” or “fixed a programming error in Y database causing added latency.” This way, you aren’t flooded with non-critical notifications when a minor IT issue arises.

3. Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)

After identifying a major IT issue or outright failure, how long does it take for the MSP to restore your IT infrastructure to normal operation? MTTR is the average time it takes for an MSP to resolve a failure fully. This metric includes the time spent detecting the failure, analyzing and resolving the issue, and ensuring that the issue doesn’t come up again. The complexities of issues vary greatly, so most MSPs group their MTTR metric into different categories depending on the type of service issue.

This metric extends the MSP’s responsibility to handle the necessary fixes and improve the performance of said systems long-term. It is like the difference between simply putting out a fire but leaving the building as it was and putting out a fire before fireproofing the building.

When you see the MTTR portion in your SLA, you can be confident in your MSP’s ability to resolve your IT issues swiftly.

4. Scope of Services

What IT assets and services is the MSP providing, exactly? It’s important to get in writing precisely which IT assets and services the MSP is providing, as any assets or services not specifically called out in the SLA document may not be covered by the MSP. 

For example, is the MSP providing maintenance services for your company’s servers? If so, what kind of maintenance and which servers? Does the SLA document say “all servers owned by [your company]” or does it list each server individually? If it lists individual servers, would a server added in the future be covered or would you need to renegotiate your managed services agreement? The scope of services SLA helps answer all of these questions so that you don’t have to worry about them. 

Within this metric, ensure that the MSP clearly defines the terms for modifying your SLA for the duration of your contract. Businesses grow and develop, so you must ensure that your contract covers you when workloads and technical capabilities change or when you have improved processes to implement.

5. System Availability

How much of the time will your IT assets be available while they’re being managed by the MSP? This SLA often requires a thorough examination of your existing IT assets before the MSP can provide a solid guarantee. They check for existing wear and tear, the presence or lack of backup systems, and other factors that may affect the stability (and thus, the availability) of the systems in question. The system availability SLA may be standardized for cloud-based services the MSP provides but may vary for your internal IT assets.

Companies usually express system availability metrics in SLAs using the following percentages:

• 99% availability = Three days of downtime annually
• 99.9% availability = Around eight hours and 45 minutes yearly in which access may be affected
• Availability of over 99.99% = Exceptional performance with almost negligible disruptions

6. Consequences for Not Meeting Service Obligations

This part of the SLA spells out the metrics and penalties for poor performance. You can use key performance indicators to measure your MSP’s performance against the expectations set in the SLA. For instance, if your MSP guarantees a system availability of 99.99% and then falls short, this portion will indicate whether you will get a monthly service credit (the most common type of remediation) or a refund, which is very rare. The SLA may also include options for terminating the contract.

Enjoy Short Response Times With a Trusted Managed Service Provider

Service Level Agreements can be the foundation of successful client-vendor relationships. Therefore, you must always review each metric in your SLA to ensure that it aligns with your business processes and that all necessary aspects are covered. This way, you can rest assured that your interests are protected.

Do you need help protecting your business from cyber threats and setting up a robust IT infrastructure that can weather the storm? Reach out to Converged Technology Group today to get started!