Lion Cipher Lab
Measure vendor SLA compliance and calculate service credits
- GRC / Compliance
- Intermediate
- ~40 min
- Free · no account required
Why it matters
A service level agreement (SLA) is the part of a vendor contract that promises how available a service will be — often a monthly uptime target like 99.9% — and what you are owed if the vendor misses it, usually a service credit (a percentage of the monthly fee knocked off the next invoice). Monitoring whether critical suppliers actually meet their SLAs is a named practice in NIST's supply-chain risk guidance (SP 800-161), and turning that monitoring into a repeatable measure is exactly what NIST's measurement guide (SP 800-55) is about. In practice, almost nobody checks. The vendor sends a…
What you'll learn
- reading an SLA: uptime target, measurement window, service credits
- computing achieved uptime from an outage log
- excluding contracted maintenance correctly
- mapping a miss to a tiered service-credit schedule
- spotting how a miscount inflates or hides a breach
- why a 'met' SLA can still mean a bad month
Steps in this lab
- What an SLA promises, and what a credit is worth
- The contract and the outage log
- Write the SLA calculator
- Run it: three verdicts and a trap
- Reading the result honestly