SLA Tracking

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) define the uptime commitments you make to your customers. PixoMonitor helps you track SLA compliance, generate reports, and get alerted before you breach your targets.

What is an SLA?

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a commitment to maintain a certain level of service availability. For example:

99.9% uptime means your service can be down for no more than ~8.7 hours per year
99.99% uptime means your service can be down for no more than ~52 minutes per year
99.5% uptime means your service can be down for no more than ~1.8 days per year

SLAs are often part of contracts with customers, and breaching them may result in service credits, refunds, or damaged trust.

Understanding Uptime Percentages

Uptime %	Downtime per Year	Downtime per Month	Downtime per Day
99%	3.65 days	7.3 hours	14.4 minutes
99.5%	1.83 days	3.65 hours	7.2 minutes
99.9%	8.76 hours	43.8 minutes	1.44 minutes
99.95%	4.38 hours	21.9 minutes	43.2 seconds
99.99%	52.56 minutes	4.38 minutes	8.64 seconds

More "nines" means less allowed downtime. Each additional nine is roughly 10x harder to achieve.

Creating an SLA

Navigate to SLA Settings

Go to Settings → SLAs and click Create SLA.

Name your SLA

Give it a descriptive name like:

"Production API SLA"
"Customer Dashboard SLA"
"Enterprise Tier SLA"

Set the target uptime

Enter your target uptime percentage. Valid values are between 90% and 100%.

Common targets:

99.9% for most production services
99.5% for internal tools
99.99% for critical infrastructure

Choose the measurement period

Select how the SLA is measured:

Monthly — Most common, resets each calendar month
Quarterly — Resets every 3 months
Yearly — Full calendar year measurement

Assign monitors

Select which monitors are included in this SLA calculation. The SLA tracks the combined uptime of all selected monitors.

SLA Measurement Periods

Monthly SLAs

The SLA period resets on the 1st of each month.

Best for:

Most customer-facing SLAs
Services with monthly billing cycles
Teams wanting frequent feedback

Example: A 99.9% monthly SLA allows ~43 minutes of downtime per month.

Quarterly SLAs

The SLA period resets every 3 months (Jan 1, Apr 1, Jul 1, Oct 1).

Best for:

Enterprise contracts with quarterly reviews
Services where short outages are acceptable if compensated elsewhere
Smoother averaging of occasional incidents

Example: A 99.9% quarterly SLA allows ~2 hours 11 minutes of downtime per quarter.

Yearly SLAs

The SLA period covers the full calendar year.

Best for:

Annual contracts
Long-term reliability tracking
Executive-level reporting

Example: A 99.9% yearly SLA allows ~8 hours 46 minutes of downtime per year.

Shorter measurement periods (monthly) create more urgency and frequent feedback. Longer periods (yearly) smooth out individual incidents but may hide trends.

Calculating SLA Compliance

PixoMonitor calculates SLA compliance based on monitor check results:

Uptime % = (Total minutes - Downtime minutes) / Total minutes × 100

What counts as downtime:

Monitor checks that return an error
Monitor checks that time out
Monitor checks that fail validation (wrong status code, missing content, etc.)

What doesn't count as downtime:

Scheduled maintenance windows (excluded from calculation)
Periods when monitoring was paused
Network issues on the monitoring side (PixoMonitor verifies from multiple locations)

SLA Dashboard

Overview

The SLA dashboard shows:

Current compliance — Real-time uptime percentage for the period
Remaining error budget — How much downtime you can still afford
Time remaining — Days left in the current period
Status — Healthy, At Risk, or Breached

Error Budget

Your "error budget" is the amount of downtime you're allowed before breaching the SLA.

Example for 99.9% monthly SLA:

Total minutes in month: 43,200 (30 days)
Allowed downtime: 43.2 minutes
If you've had 20 minutes of downtime: 23.2 minutes remaining

The error budget visualization shows:

Green: Plenty of budget remaining
Yellow: Budget getting low (at risk)
Red: Budget exhausted (breached)

When error budget is low, consider postponing risky changes (deployments, migrations) until the next SLA period.

Historical View

View SLA compliance over time:

Graph showing uptime percentage per period
Table of past periods with exact numbers
Trend analysis (improving or declining)

Breach Notifications

Get alerted when your SLA is at risk or breached.

Alert Thresholds

Configure notifications at different thresholds:

At risk — Alert when you've used 75% of your error budget
Critical — Alert when you've used 90% of your error budget
Breached — Alert when SLA is officially breached

Notification Channels

SLA alerts can be sent to any configured alert channel:

Email
Slack
PagerDuty
Webhooks

Open SLA settings

Go to the SLA you want to configure alerts for.

Enable breach notifications

Toggle on Notify on breach.

Select alert channels

Choose which channels should receive SLA notifications.

Configure thresholds

Optionally adjust the at-risk and critical thresholds.

SLA Reports

Generating Reports

Create reports for stakeholders, customers, or compliance requirements:

Go to SLAs → Reports
Select the SLA
Choose the time period
Click Generate Report

Report Contents

SLA reports include:

Overall uptime percentage
Downtime breakdown by incident
Longest outage duration
Mean time to recovery (MTTR)
Comparison to previous periods

Exporting Reports

Reports can be exported as:

PDF — For sharing with customers or management
CSV — For importing into spreadsheets or other tools
JSON — For programmatic access

Multiple Monitors per SLA

An SLA can include multiple monitors. The combined uptime is calculated based on when any included monitor is down.

Example: API SLA with 3 monitors:

/health endpoint
/api/users endpoint
/api/orders endpoint

If any one is down, it counts against the SLA.

For services with independent components, create separate SLAs for each. For services where all components must be available, group monitors under one SLA.

Weighted Monitors

Some services treat certain endpoints as more important. While PixoMonitor doesn't support weighted calculations directly, you can:

Create separate SLAs for different tiers (critical endpoints vs. secondary features)
Set different uptime targets for each SLA
Report on them separately