Ready to guarantee your uptime?
UptimeEye monitors your services 24/7 and alerts you before you breach your SLA commitments.
- Monitor uptime against your SLA targets
- Instant alerts when approaching SLA thresholds
- Automated SLA compliance reports
Real-time SLA monitoring
Track your actual uptime against SLA commitments with 30-second checks (Pro and Agency) from up to 6 global regions (Agency; Pro 3, Free 1).
SLA breach alerts
Get notified before you exceed your downtime budget via Slack, Email, PagerDuty, and more.
Uptime reports
Generate detailed SLA compliance reports for stakeholders and customers with historical data.
What is an SLA (service level agreement)?
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a commitment between a service provider and a customer that defines the expected level of service. In the context of uptime monitoring, an SLA specifies the percentage of time a service should be operational.
Common SLA tiers:
- •90% (Basic) - Suitable for non-critical systems (3 days downtime per month)
- •99% (Two nines) - A common level for business applications (7 hours 12 minutes downtime per month)
- •99.9% (Three nines) - Suitable for critical business systems (43 minutes 12 seconds downtime per month)
- •99.99% (Four nines) - Mission-critical applications (4 minutes 19 seconds downtime per month)
- •99.999% (Five nines) - Maximum availability for essential infrastructure (25 seconds downtime per month)
Why SLAs Matter: SLAs translate technical uptime percentages into real-world downtime budgets. A 99.9% SLA might sound impressive, but it actually allows for 43 minutes 12 seconds of downtime per month - which could be significant for your business operations.
Understanding your downtime budget
Each SLA percentage corresponds to a specific amount of allowed downtime. Here's how the commonly targeted 99.9% SLA breaks down across different time periods:
99.9% SLA downtime by period:
- Daily:1 minute 26 seconds
- Weekly:10 minutes 4 seconds
- Monthly:43 minutes 12 seconds
- Yearly:8 hours 45 minutes 36 seconds
Key considerations:
- Planned Maintenance: Does your SLA include planned maintenance windows, or are they excluded from downtime calculations?
- Measurement Period: Is downtime calculated daily, monthly, or annually? This affects your operational flexibility.
- Consequences: What are the penalties for breaching the SLA? Service credits, refunds, or contract termination?
- Exclusions: Are certain types of outages (network, third-party services) excluded from SLA calculations?
Example scenario:
If you have a 99.95% SLA for a critical e-commerce platform, your monthly downtime allowance is only 21 minutes 36 seconds. If your site goes down for 30 minutes during a busy shopping period, you've breached your SLA. This could result in service credits or financial penalties, plus the revenue loss from the outage itself.
How to use the SLA calculator
Calculate downtime from SLA percentage:
- Enter your target SLA percentage (e.g., 99.9%) in the input field
- View downtime allowances across all time periods (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly)
- Use preset buttons for quick access to common SLA targets
Calculate SLA from downtime:
- Switch to "Downtime to SLA %" mode using the toggle
- Enter your downtime budget in days, hours, minutes, and seconds
- See the resulting SLA percentage for each time period
Share your calculations:
Click the "Share" button to copy a URL with your calculation. Share it with your team, save it for future reference, or include it in your documentation.
Tips for choosing SLA targets:
- →Consider your business requirements and user expectations when setting SLA targets
- →Factor in planned maintenance windows and deployment schedules
- →Monitor actual uptime against your SLA commitments using tools like UptimeEye
- →Remember: Higher SLA percentages require more robust infrastructure and increase operational costs