Service Level Agreement
Effective date: October 1, 2015
Our Commitment
We understand that any interruption to service is too much. So we've set the bar high because we believe that you should be able to depend on the service you need to run your volunteers. This is why we offer an SLA to organisations that guarantees 99.95% monthly uptime. If you’ve read software SLAs before, you’ll know that they can be pretty confusing. So we made ours simple and transparent. Our SLA is based directly on our publicly available monthly uptime. All you need to know is this number.
What happens if we fail to hit our target in any given month?
If we don’t meet our 99.95% monthly uptime guarantee, we’ll refund you 5x whatever you paid us for that period of downtime.
How do we monitor “Downtime”?
We track “Downtime” by measuring the server side error rate, and by using server monitoring software to look at results from ping tests, web server tests, TCP port tests, and website tests.
What is not “Downtime”?
These are the things that won’t count as Downtime:
- Slowness with specific features such as a report.
- Issues related to external integrations or caused by third parties specific to your instance.
- Network problems external to our systems which are out of our control, such as bad routing tables between your ISP and our servers.
- Any “Planned Downtime”. (See below)
What is “Downtime”?
Downtime is based on two factors:
- the number of minutes the service was unavailable, and
- the percent of users that were affected.
By considering both these factors, we can be fair in assessing the overall magnitude of downtime for everyone, across the board. For every outage, we calculate Downtime by multiplying the number of outage minutes by the percent of users affected. To arrive at that month’s entire “Downtime Period,” we sum up all those numbers for the whole month.
Why are we tracking Downtime in this way?
We’re doing our best to keep things simple and transparent:
- It’s too complicated to calculate Downtime for every individual user or group of users. Instead of adding lots of ifs, buts, and then's in our SLA, we’re simplifying things by tying our guarantee to a single transparent monthly uptime number.
- Downtime doesn’t affect everyone at the same time or in the same way. A service of DutySheet could be experiencing an outage but your team may be completely unaffected, and vice versa.
How do we calculate “Monthly Uptime”?
Monthly Uptime Percentage is simply the percent of total possible minutes the service was available to you. We subtract the Downtime minutes from the total possible minutes in a given month to calculate this. You can find our historic uptime for the entire service here.
What do we mean by “Planned Downtime”?
Once in a while, we need to perform service impacting maintenance. In these situations, we’ll give you at least 48 hours advance notice for “Planned Downtime.” We try to limit this as much as possible and there won’t be more than 20 hours of Planned Downtime in a calendar year. If it’s “Planned,” we don’t count that towards the “Downtime” mentioned earlier either.
How is “Service Credit” calculated?
Once we calculate your “Downtime” (see above), we’ll refund you 5x what you paid for the service for that amount of time. For example, if our uptime falls to 99.94% in a given month, that results in about 26 minutes of Downtime. We’ll give you service credits equivalent to 5x your organisations cost for that period of time. Service Credit can’t be exchanged for cash (monetary compensation); it is added as a credit on your account and, as always, we use any credits you have first, before charging you.
Is there a “Maximum Service Credit”?
Yes, service credits are capped at a maximum of 30 days worth of paid service for your organisation.
What’s not included in this SLA?
This SLA doesn’t include performance issues:
- caused by factors outside of our reasonable control;
- that resulted from any actions or inactions of you or any third party;
- that resulted from your equipment and/or third party equipment (not within the primary control of us), or
- arising from our suspension and termination of your right to use the service in our Terms of Use