While visiting a customer last week (a large SaaS platform company), we started to have an interesting discussion around Service Level Agreements (SLAs) during which he encouraged me to write this blog.
When I was tasked with setting up the QoS Team at DoubleClick in 1999, the primary mission was to setup a monitoring team (internal, external, etc.) and the secondary mission was actually an accidental one: to manage our SLAs.
This became a hot priority in 2001, we paid out over $1 million (in real money) in penalties for SLA violations to a single customer. Basically, someone on our side signed a contract with insane service commitments like 100% uptime.