Why your ISP's SLA may not mean much.
I subscribe to the Business DSL service from Speakeasy.net for my home DSL. My DSL service is important to my business because it is the primary link to my data centers. I recently upgraded the service to 3 Mb/s and since the upgrade the line has been flapping. My monitoring console showed me that in the course of a day the circuit would flap 4 to 5 times, occurring in bursts. The longest outage wasn’t very long, just 3-5 minutes, but it was extremely irritating: I lost a blog entry I was writing for this blog over a web-based client! I called Speakeasy to discuss the problem with them and they told me that they could not monitor my circuit because it is provisioned through AT&T. I reminded them that they had an SLA with me, to which they agreed. So I said to the representative, how is your SLA enforced? He told me that I had to do my own monitoring, and I had to give them the details on when my circuit was down, and then they would credit my account.
This is a classic example of how service providers sell based on SLA, but because of limitations and corner cases and glitches, can’t always deliver on what’s promised. This is one of the reasons I decided to get into the network monitoring business – I wanted to provide this information to other people and empower them in their relationships with their service providers.
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