SLA
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is an agreement between a service provider and a customer that is contractually recorded. Originally, the term comes from the IT industry, but today it is applied to services of all kinds. Service level agreements are used to measure the company's service performance, and the SLAs also give the customer certain rights that protect him as a customer or consumer.
If the customer buys a certain IT service (e.g. SAP hosting), the customer is assured of a certain performance and a certain security against failure before the contract is concluded. All services provided by the service provider and all consequences for the service provider if it does not fulfil the agreed service must be precisely specified in the customer contract, the SLA.