SLA and SLO guarantees
What HowlOps commits to about its own platform availability, what it measures and publishes, and the SLA/SLO targets you can set for your own monitors.
Why this page exists
"SLA" and "SLO" show up in two different places in HowlOps, and they mean two different things. This page keeps them apart:
- A commitment HowlOps would make about its own platform — "HowlOps itself is up 99.9% of the time, and if it isn't, you get a credit." That is a formal uptime SLA for us as a vendor.
- A target HowlOps helps you track for your own monitored services — "my API should be up 99.9% of the time, tell me if it isn't." That is an SLA/SLO reporting feature you point at your own endpoints.
These are not the same thing, and mixing them up is the single most common way this gets misread. The short version: HowlOps does not make commitment (1). It does provide (2) as a product feature. Keep reading for exactly what each one means in practice.
HowlOps does not currently publish a formal, contractual uptime SLA with service credits for its own platform. If your organization needs one, contact [email protected] to discuss a custom agreement.
What we do commit to for our own platform
Since there is no contractual number to promise, here is what we actually do instead:
- We measure our own availability the same way we measure yours — from independent vantage points, on a fixed schedule, and we do not hide the result.
- We publish it in real time. howlops.com/status shows a rolling 90-day uptime percentage for HowlOps itself, computed from our own self-check suite (not a marketing number, not hand-edited). Each day in the 90-day strip either shows a real measured value or is shown as "no data" in grey. We never paint an unmeasured day as a green 100% day.
- We separate platform components. The status page reports on the parts of HowlOps that keep your monitoring running (checks, alerting, dashboard) separately, so a problem in one area doesn't get blurred into an overall "everything is fine" or "everything is down" headline.
- Incidents affecting HowlOps itself are posted on the same page, with updates as they are investigated and resolved.
The uptime percentage on the status page is a report of what already happened, not a target we are promising to hit. There is no service-credit mechanism tied to it.
What HowlOps computes for your own services
This is the part of HowlOps that is a real, supported product feature: setting an SLA/SLO target for a service you monitor, and getting reports on whether it was met.
- Every monitor can carry an availability SLO: a target percentage and a rolling time window. If you never configure one, HowlOps defaults to 99.9% over a 30-day window for the purpose of reports and dashboards — that default is a starting point for your reporting, not a promise from HowlOps about anything.
- The monitor's SLO view shows current uptime against the target, how much of the error budget is used, and whether you're on pace to stay within it.
- The SLA report (Analytics → SLA report, or the API) rolls this up per monitor and for your whole workspace over any date range: uptime %, downtime minutes, incident count, and mean time to recovery (MTTR). It exports as CSV for client reviews, invoices, or compliance records.
- "Down" time counted into these reports is the same outcome that would have paged you: a failure confirmed the way described in How we verify outages. A failure that was real but had its page held back (see "Suppressed" on that page) still counts as downtime in your SLA numbers — the report reflects what happened, not just what you were notified about.
- SLA/SLO reporting is a paid Uptime capability. See Reports & analytics for how to configure and export it, and Plans and capabilities for which plans include it.
SLA/SLO targets you set apply to the services you are monitoring. They are not, and do not create, a guarantee about HowlOps's own uptime.
Where the current numbers live
Specific figures (which plans include SLA/SLO reporting, minimum check intervals, retention windows) change over time and are enforced server-side, so this page intentionally does not duplicate a static table. Check current values here:
| Question | Where to look |
|---|---|
| Is our own platform up right now, and what's its recent uptime? | howlops.com/status |
| Does my plan include SLA/SLO reporting? | Plans and capabilities and Effective limits and quotas |
| How do I set an SLA target and export a report? | Reports & analytics |
| How is a failure verified before it counts as downtime? | How we verify outages |
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