I am now two emails into a “discussion” with one of our sales drones (who ought to know better) who keeps asking me “The customer doesn’t understand why this SLA only covers the hours of 9AM to 6PM, and only on weekdays. What about the rest of the hours and days? How do they get 24×7 support out of this SLA?”
And of course the answer which I keep trying to keep myself from POUNDING INTO HER FUCKING HEAD WITH A GORRAM SLEDGEHAMMER is that this particular SLA doesn’t COVER 24×7 service. It says right in black in white, “Higher levels of service availability may be contracted separately. Please contact your sales representative for a quote.”
“Can we rename ‘Service Hours’ to ‘Technical Support Hours’?”
No, because “Service Hours” refers to the hours that we guarantee that the service will have whatever percentage uptime they’ve contracted for. That includes technical support but also includes other things like the ops guy, equipment maintenance, etc etc ad nauseum.
“Why don’t we notify the customer when we have scheduled outages?”
Because as it says RIGHT IN THE FUCKING SLA, we’re talking about Microsoft Updates, which come down when Redmond decides to push them to us, and the machine is scheduled to install them when they become available. And that doesn’t always happen right on Patch Tuesday. I’ve seen it happen as late as Friday morning.
The customer in question is a very large and venerable East Coast university, a long-time customer. You would think their IT people could read a simple SLA. You would think our sales drone could read it, for that matter. This thing is only two pages long, for cripes sake.