OUTAGE? WHAT OUTAGE?
Not surprisingly, carriers draft their SLAs to minimize their risks, obligations, and financial exposure. One way they do this is through the definition and use of terms. Outage and downtime illustrate the importance of terminology. Carriers often define "outage" as a complete loss of service, and "downtime" as the period during which a service experiences an outage, meaning the system is completely down. This effectively excludes any situation where there's nominal connectivity, but the service is operationally useless.
Carriers may resist revising the definition of an outage or the calculation of downtime, but it's worth pushing the issue. For example, carriers will often compromise on the "outage" issue by acknowledging that periods of service degradation are outages, but only if the customer is willing to release the service for testing and repair.
When carriers fight revising outage and downtime definitions, they often claim that change is unnecessary because periods of degradation are covered by alternative measures, such as latency, throughput, and jitter. They're right in one respect, but wrong in a more practical sense. Although these other measures provide useful ways to track service quality, associated remedies are weaker than those provided under the availability SLA. Moreover, these other measures are seldom tracked on a real-time or customer-specific basis, except when a problem arises or the customer has an expensive network management agreement. Availability remains the touchstone for defining and measuring performance, and customers should insist that outages fall under that category.
Fixing the definition of outage and downtime is just the beginning. The revised terms must be used correctly throughout the SLA. For example, in the definition of availability, generic references to "disruptions" or "troubles" must be replaced with the defined term, "outage." Furthermore, the calculation of availability must include and accurately apply the definition of downtime. Getting the right terms in place and using them consistently minimizes ambiguity and avoids needless fights over SLA application once the services are in place.
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