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A service-level agreement (SLA) is a formal agreement between a service company and the customer. For Azure, this agreement defines the performance standards that Microsoft commits to for you, the customer.
Here’s a table to give you a sense of how total downtime decreases as the SLA percentage increases from 99 percent to 99.999 percent:
SLA percentage | Downtime per week | Downtime per month | Downtime per year |
---|---|---|---|
99 | 1.68 hours | 7.2 hours | 3.65 days |
99.9 | 10.1 minutes | 43.2 minutes | 8.76 hours |
99.95 | 5 minutes | 21.6 minutes | 4.38 hours |
99.99 | 1.01 minutes | 4.32 minutes | 52.56 minutes |
99.999 | 6 seconds | 25.9 seconds | 5.26 minutes |
A service credit is the percentage of the fees you paid that are credited back to you according to the claim approval process.
An SLA describes how Microsoft responds when an Azure service fails to perform to its specification. For example, you might receive a discount on your Azure bill as compensation when a service fails to perform according to its SLA.
Free products typically don’t have an SLA.
Azure status provides a global view of the health of Azure services and regions. If you suspect there’s an outage, this is often a good place to start your investigation.
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