# What is Service Level Agreement (SLA)?

> A contractual commitment on response or resolution times.

Canonical: https://www.decimal.app/glossary/sla · Last reviewed: 2026-09-23

An SLA is an agreement between a company and its customer that sets targets such as first response within one hour for urgent tickets, and often defines remedies if they're missed.

## Why it matters

SLAs make support quality enforceable. Escalated tickets are the most likely to breach because they depend on another team's time.

## Best practices

1. Set internal targets below the SLA. Leave a buffer.
2. Alert before breach. Not after.
3. Align engineering. If support's SLA depends on engineering, engineering needs a target too.

## How Decimal helps

Decimal helps teams meet SLAs by responding immediately and cutting the investigation time that usually causes breaches.

## Related terms

- [Service Level Objective (SLO)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/slo): An internal reliability target, like 99.9% of requests succeeding.
- [First Response Time (FRT)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/first-response-time): How long a customer waits for the first human or agent reply to a ticket.
- [Resolution Time](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/resolution-time): Elapsed time from a ticket's creation to its final resolution.
- [Priority](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/priority): How soon a ticket should be worked, relative to everything else.

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