Operational Level Agreement (OLA)

A service level agreement, or SLA, is something that you should have with all your providers. That is, you should expect them to operate at a certain level, especially if your internal systems and your business rely on those services.

However, there are some gaps in what the SLA covers. That is, it maintains a certain standard, things like uptime, but it doesn't say how they're going to perform their functions when it comes to maintaining those SLAs. In that case we may want an operational level agreement. One thing to note is that an OLA could go by many different names, so it's not necessarily called an operational level agreement.

SLA Versus OLA

Both an SLA and OLA really has to deal with service providers providing a service, and the SLA specifies what level of a service is going to be provided. So in essence it's going to be things like uptime, versus an OLA is how are we going to achieve that, what are the operations that we are going to perform to give you that SLA.

What we're seeing here is we're seeing the long list of Amazon services, Amazon Web Services, that they can deliver, and all the SLAs for their services. Now an SLA can be more complex than what you're seeing here, but essentially it's a little more simplistic and just what is the service levels that are being delivered.

In contrast, an operational level agreement can be a little more complex. It gives the operational level of what's going to happen. So here we see an operational level agreement for UC Berkeley. So as we scroll through here, it starts out with a general overview, goes over the services and dependencies and what those look like. It outlines who are the responsible parties, so who's signing this contract or coming into this contract, what are the rules and responsibilities for each of those parties. It gets into the what if there's an incident, what incident management looks like. So it gets much more detailed in that operational level.

How Common Are They?

One question you may have is what is the use of these two documents and how common are they. Well, the SLA is very standard. This is, if you're a service provider, your customers are probably going to ask for it. If you are getting services from a service provider, you're going to want to see the SLA and verify what service levels you're agreeing to.

The operational agreement is not as common, not nearly as common as the SLA. So where we see this come into play is if you care about how the service is being delivered, not just what the service levels are.