SLA

Also known as: Service Level Agreement

A contracted commitment to a measurable response or resolution time, scoped by ticket priority and business hours.

An SLA turns vague promises (“we’ll get to it quickly”) into measurable commitments (“P1 first response in 15 minutes during business hours, 1 hour out of hours”). Most MSP contracts define separate response and resolution targets per priority tier (P1 critical → P4 informational).

For a tech, the practical takeaways are:

Ticket priority isn’t cosmetic, it determines what you must respond to first
First response means a real human action, not an auto-acknowledgement email
The clock starts at ticket creation time, including out-of-hours, unless the SLA explicitly says business-hours-only
Pause/stop conditions (waiting on customer) are how you protect SLA when you’re genuinely blocked