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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteAn uptime service-level agreement (SLA) is a conditional contract, not a promise that an application will never fail. It defines how a provider measures availability, what requirements you must meet, and the service credit available when the measured result misses the target. The usual remedy is a credit against future bills rather than a cash refund. To decide whether you have a valid claim, you must match the provider’s downtime definition, eligible charges, exclusions, evidence rules and filing deadline.
What an uptime SLA actually guarantees
Microsoft’s Azure reliability guidance describes an SLA as “a set of conditional commitments.” That wording matters. The provider commits to a measured service outcome only when the service, configuration and customer behavior satisfy the agreement. An SLA does not guarantee that your application is reliable, that every user avoids downtime, or that the provider prevents every failure.
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A measured obligation, not insurance
An SLA normally combines four elements: an availability target, a definition of unavailability, prerequisites for eligibility, and a remedy if the result falls below the target. The remedy is commonly a service credit calculated from specified charges. It is not automatically compensation for lost sales, staff time, data recovery or consequential damages.
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“99.9% uptime” has no universal meaning. The percentage may apply to one service component, one region, a particular billing month and a narrowly defined failure signal. Another provider may measure a different component or require a redundant architecture before the target applies. Compare the complete SLA language, not the percentage in a product summary.
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How providers calculate uptime
The basic monthly formula
Many cloud agreements calculate Monthly Uptime Percentage by subtracting the proportion of unavailable minutes from 100%. If a 30-day month contains 43,200 minutes and the service is unavailable for 43 qualifying minutes, the measured availability is approximately 99.9005%. The arithmetic is simple; deciding which minutes qualify is the difficult part.
“Unavailable” is service-specific
Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 defines unavailability using external connectivity. For an individual EC2 instance, the instance is unavailable when it has no external connectivity. The region-level definition is narrower and requires qualifying instances in multiple Availability Zones to be simultaneously without external connectivity. A synthetic monitor that cannot reach your application may show an incident, but it is not conclusive proof under an SLA that uses a different signal.
Measurement scope to verify
- Service component: confirm whether the agreement covers an instance, a regional service, an API operation, storage, networking or another component.
- Geography: identify the covered region or regions; a problem in an uncovered location does not create an eligible event.
- Aggregation: check whether downtime is counted per request, per resource, per minute, or only when several resources fail together.
- Billing period: establish whether the calculation resets monthly and which minutes belong to the claim month.
- Eligibility: verify that your resources, account and configuration satisfy the agreement’s definitions.
A concrete example: AWS EC2 credit tiers
AWS publishes separate region-level and instance-level EC2 commitments. The region-level target is 99.99% Monthly Uptime Percentage. The instance-level target is 99.5%. When the measured result falls into a tier, AWS provides a credit against eligible monthly EC2 charges in the affected region.
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| EC2 SLA scope | Availability result | Service credit | Credit basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Region-level (99.99% target) | Below 99.99% but at least 99.0% | 10% | Eligible monthly EC2 charges in the affected region |
| Region-level (99.99% target) | Below 99.0% but at least 95.0% | 30% | Eligible monthly EC2 charges in the affected region |
| Region-level (99.99% target) | Below 95.0% | 100% | Eligible monthly EC2 charges in the affected region |
| Instance-level (99.5% target) | Below 99.5% but at least 99.0% | 10% | Eligible monthly EC2 charges in the affected region |
| Instance-level (99.5% target) | Below 99.0% but at least 95.0% | 30% | Eligible monthly EC2 charges in the affected region |
| Instance-level (99.5% target) | Below 95.0% | 100% | Eligible monthly EC2 charges in the affected region |
The tier is not a cash refund for every charge on your account. It is calculated from the eligible EC2 charges defined by the agreement and applied to future EC2 payments. A 100% tier therefore means 100% of the covered monthly EC2 charges in the specified scope, not reimbursement of unrelated services, business losses or previous invoices.
Prerequisites and exclusions that can void a claim
Architecture and configuration requirements
Providers often make an SLA conditional on how you deploy the service. Microsoft notes that prerequisites can include a required configuration, deployment topology or operational behavior. A regional commitment may require resources in multiple Availability Zones; a database commitment may require a supported replication mode; an API commitment may require use of a documented endpoint. If your design does not meet the stated prerequisite, the advertised percentage may not apply even when your monitor recorded an outage.
Customer-caused events
Exclusions commonly cover actions or inaction by the customer, customer equipment or software, and failure to follow documentation or best practices. For example, deleting a required resource, exhausting a quota, blocking network access with your own rule or running an unsupported configuration can remove the event from the SLA calculation.
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Events outside the provider’s reasonable control
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery’s exclusions illustrate the category: events outside AWS’s reasonable control, customer actions or inaction, customer equipment or software, and failures to follow documentation or best practices. The exact list differs by service, so an exclusion from one AWS product cannot be assumed to apply identically to another.
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Maintenance, previews and dependencies
Read how the agreement treats scheduled maintenance, beta or preview features, quotas, third-party services and force-majeure events. An outage can be real and still be excluded. Likewise, an upstream identity, DNS, internet or SaaS dependency may fail while the contracted service continues to meet its own definition of availability.
Credit versus refund: what you normally receive
Credits are the standard remedy
A service credit reduces a future bill or is applied to future use. AWS EC2 states that credits are applied against future payments. Google Cloud Spanner likewise applies approved financial credits to future use. If you stop using the service, the credit may have little practical value, depending on the governing agreement.
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Caps and exclusive-remedy language
Some agreements cap the total credit for a billing month and describe it as the sole and exclusive remedy. Google Cloud’s 2026 Spanner SLA caps aggregate monthly financial credits at 50% of the amount due for the covered service. That cap applies even if several qualifying incidents occur in the same month. Procurement and legal teams should review the contract before assuming a right to damages, termination payment or a cash refund.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to claim an uptime SLA credit
- Identify the exact SLA. Use the service, edition, region and billing period that were active during the incident. Do not rely on a general platform SLA when a component-specific agreement governs.
- Confirm eligibility. Check architecture, resource type, account status, configuration and any operational requirements. Record evidence that the prerequisites were satisfied before the outage.
- Reconstruct qualifying downtime. Use the provider’s definition and aggregation method. Preserve timestamps in a consistent time zone, affected resource identifiers, error responses, monitoring records and incident communications.
- Separate excluded minutes. Remove maintenance, customer-caused events, unsupported configurations, quota failures and other exclusions listed in the agreement. Keep the reason for every excluded interval.
- Calculate the expected credit. Apply the tier to eligible charges only, then apply any monthly cap. A third-party uptime percentage is an estimate until the provider validates it under the contract’s measurement system.
- File through the required channel. Follow the SLA’s support or billing procedure and attach the requested evidence. Some agreements require a support case rather than an invoice dispute.
- Meet the deadline. Google Cloud Spanner requires notification to technical support within 30 days from the time the customer becomes eligible. Missing that window forfeits the financial credit.
- Track the decision. Save the case number, calculation, approval or rejection reason and the invoice on which the credit appears. Escalate only through the contract’s stated process.
How to compare uptime guarantees
Use the following checklist when evaluating providers or negotiating an SLA. A lower percentage with broad coverage can be more useful than a higher percentage restricted to a narrow component.
| Comparison point | Questions to answer |
|---|---|
| Target and scope | What percentage applies to which service component, region, edition and billing period? |
| Downtime definition | What signal counts as unavailable, and are incidents aggregated across resources or zones? |
| Architecture prerequisites | Are multi-zone, multi-region, replication or specific configuration requirements mandatory? |
| Exclusions | How are maintenance, force majeure, customer faults, quotas, preview features and third-party dependencies treated? |
| Credit schedule and cap | What percentage of which charges is credited, what is the maximum, and is it future-use only? |
| Claim mechanics | Is evidence required, which support channel is valid, is the claim automatic, and what is the deadline? |
| Remedy language | Is the credit the sole and exclusive remedy, or do other contractual rights apply? |
Common mistakes and how to avoid them
Treating a monitor as the contract
External monitoring is valuable for incident response, but its result may not match the provider’s qualifying signal. Keep monitor data, then map each event to the SLA definition instead of submitting the raw percentage as conclusive proof.
Multiplying vendor percentages
Do not multiply several provider SLA percentages to claim an end-to-end guarantee. Microsoft warns that composite calculations can ignore dependency correlation, different definitions and exclusions. Two services that each advertise high availability can fail at the same time or measure different outcomes.
Claiming every charge on the invoice
Credits usually apply to a defined service and eligible charges in an affected region. Separate covered usage from support, data transfer, unrelated products, taxes and other line items unless the agreement expressly includes them.
Waiting until the invoice dispute window
A billing cycle is not necessarily the SLA claim window. The Spanner example uses a 30-day notification deadline measured from eligibility, not simply from the invoice date. Put the deadline in your incident checklist as soon as the outage is identified.
Ignoring the contract’s remedy clause
A credit may be the complete contractual remedy. Check the master agreement, order form and service-specific SLA together, because the service page alone may not describe every limitation that governs your account.
What a practical SLA review should produce
Before purchasing or renewing a service, create a one-page record containing the target, scope, unavailability definition, prerequisites, exclusions, credit tiers, cap, eligible charges, filing channel, deadline and remedy language. During an incident, add synchronized logs, resource IDs, deployment details and a timeline of customer actions. This turns an ambiguous outage into a verifiable contract question and makes a valid claim much less likely to fail on a technicality.
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