SLA: response vs resolution

A service level agreement sets measurable commitments for support. The two most important are response time, the maximum time before an engineer acknowledges the issue and begins work, and resolution time, the maximum time before the issue is fixed or an acceptable workaround is in place. Both are usually tiered by severity: a production outage might carry a one-hour response and four-hour resolution target, while a cosmetic bug might be days.

The distinction matters because vendors often advertise fast response without any resolution commitment. An automated acknowledgement within fifteen minutes is worthless if nobody works the issue for two days. Conversely, resolution targets need definitions: what counts as resolved, whether a workaround qualifies, and whether the clock pauses while waiting on the client.

SLAs also define coverage hours, whether business hours in a given time zone or 24x7, and what happens when a target is missed, typically service credits. An SLA is not a guarantee of zero incidents; it is a commitment about how incidents are handled.

• Operations head: needs to know, for each severity, when a fix will actually be in place, not just when someone will reply.
• CTO / Head of Engineering: uses SLA severity definitions to decide what must be monitored and alerted automatically versus reported by users.
• CFO: service credits and coverage hours determine what the monthly fee actually buys, and whether 24x7 cover is worth its premium.
• Support manager: aligns the internal customer-facing SLA with the vendor's engineering SLA so promises to end customers are achievable.

SLAs exist because "we will fix it quickly" is unenforceable and interpreted differently by each side. Separating response from resolution exists because the two measure different things: response measures attentiveness, resolution measures capability and priority. A vendor can be excellent at one and poor at the other. Naming both, with severity tiers and coverage hours, lets a buyer compare offers honestly and hold a provider to account. The trade-off is that tight resolution targets across all hours are expensive to staff, so a realistic SLA matches severity to business impact rather than promising everything to everyone.

• A fintech defining a one-hour response and four-hour resolution target for outages of its loan-origination platform during business hours.
• A SaaS company whose customer-facing 99.9% uptime promise is backed by a vendor SLA with 24x7 severity-one response.
• A hospital requiring resolution targets for its patient-booking voice agent, with workaround defined as fallback to human reception.
• A logistics operator setting shorter targets during peak season for its dispatch platform and relaxed ones off-season.
• An education institution with resolution commitments tied to the academic calendar for admissions and examination modules.

Standard / regulationA contractual specification you negotiate rather than a skill you learn. Eazyware's Care Plans define response and resolution targets per severity and tier, with the definitions of resolved, coverage hours and clock rules written into the agreement.

Eazyware service that covers it: Software Maintenance & Support. Starting prices are on the pricing page.