Is there an easy way to monitor when a companies uptime drops below what is specified in their SLA and enforce the penalties? It also seems like something that should be published somewhere for new customers to see.<p>Slack has a stated uptime of 99.99% (4.5 minutes per month) in their SLA, but just today alone they are already approaching 30 minutes and it seems like this has been happening on a quarterly basis. Are they paying for this?
<a href="https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Plus-Plan-Service-Level-Agreement-SLA-" rel="nofollow">https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Plus-Plan...</a><p>it's interesting to read how downtime is precisely defined.<p>If slack is available for all other customers 100% of the time, ignoring scheduled downtime, but is never available for you, and they have at least 10,000 customers in total, then this suffices to hit their 99.99% downtime target.<p>> If we fall short of our 99.99% uptime guarantee, we’ll refund customers on the Plus plan and above 100 times the amount your workspace paid during the period Slack was down.<p>In this case they would not refund any customers, including you, since they had hit their 99.99% uptime guarantee averaged over all their customers.
Generally to claim a refund from a company you need to be moitoring them yourself.<p>You need to be able to say "We have this thing in our office pinging your API, and it was down for the last 96 minutes, therefore pay up!"<p>If you don't chase the company and present evidence, they won't pay for their own SLA violations.<p>The companies own status dashboards usually don't have sufficient proof to claim. "We are investigating reports that some customers may be encountering connection difficulties" isn't enough info to prove that <i>you</i> were seeing downtime.
Paying customers usually get back credits from slack after downtime, I have a recollection that free accounts also got something at some point.<p>* Slack refunds customers 100x amount paid during outage - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16487812" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16487812</a><p>* <a href="https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Service-Level-Agreements-SLA-" rel="nofollow">https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Service-L...</a>
In one project company x had to pay an avg calculated loss to company y. Both did business in a joint venture. 5 figures per hour.<p>In our SLA in another company it was written in every big contract because customer companies where asking for it.<p>Some specific SLA meant oncall duty. Something like this cost money and affect the monthly support and operations price.
> already approaching 30 minutes<p>I've been having connection trouble essentially all day.<p>As far as I can tell this has been going on for hours.
Usually nothing.<p>For super serious stuff it's a different story but in the average small-medium SaaS case you may end up with an apology email and $9 paid back or something to that effect.