Service Level Agreements

An IT service level agreement, or SLA, is the written part of a managed services contract that defines how quickly your provider will react to a problem and how quickly they will finish fixing it. A useful SLA states a response time, a resolution time, and an escalation path for each priority level, and it says what happens when a target is missed. If a provider will not put those numbers in writing, they are not offering an SLA.

Response time is how long before a named technician takes ownership of your ticket. Resolution time is how long before the problem is actually gone. Response is the easy number to guarantee, which is why most providers advertise it. Resolution is the number that reflects what an outage costs you, so it is the one we commit to and publish.

For a critical outage affecting everyone, expect a technician assigned within 15 minutes and a resolution target measured in hours rather than days. For a single user issue, a few hours to response and a few days to resolution is normal. NOC Technology commits to 15 minutes response and 8 hours resolution on Critical, 1 hour and 16 hours on High, 4 hours and 5 business days on Normal, and 8 hours and 10 business days on Low.

Our average time to resolve a Critical ticket is 2.28 hours against an 8 hour commitment, roughly 3.5 times faster than promised. High priority averages 6.7 hours against a 16 hour commitment. Across every SLA tier we resolved 347 of 348 critical tickets inside target.

Yes. Response, resolution and escalation targets are written into every managed IT services agreement, and they are the same targets published on this page. We also publish our measured performance against them, which is the part most providers leave out. Our resolution SLA compliance is 96.8 % across 3,257 tracked resolutions.

A missed target triggers internal escalation, and the ticket is reviewed rather than quietly closed. We report our compliance rate publicly instead of hiding it, so you can see the misses as well as the hits. Beyond the SLA, our 90 day guarantee means that if the relationship is not working we refund your previous month of service costs, help you move to another provider, and hand over all the documentation we have built.

Yes. Support coverage runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and SLA clocks run against that coverage. Our help desk is staffed in Missouri with no overseas call centers, so the person who answers is the person who can act.

Priority is assigned on business impact, not on urgency of tone. Critical means service is unavailable for all users and core functions are down. High means limited degradation where some users or functions are affected but business continues. Normal means one user is affected and the business process continues. Low means maintenance work with no noticeable degradation. If a single user is completely unable to do their job, that is not treated as Low.

They are included in every managed IT services plan at no additional cost. Higher tier agreements carry tighter resolution targets, at 4 hours on Critical and 8 hours on High. You can see what is included at each level on our pricing page.