What is the Microsoft Teams Service Level Agreement? 99.9% Uptime

Microsoft Teams service is run by Microsoft and Microsoft provide customers with a Service Level Agreement. The Service level agreement offers service credits if Microsoft falls below its SLA.

Service Credits are your sole and exclusive remedy for any performance or availability issues for any Service under the Microsoft Agreement and SLA. The Service Credits awarded in any billing month for a particular Service or Service Resource will not, under any circumstance, exceed your monthly service fees for that Service or Service Resource, as applicable, in the billing month.

Microsoft Teams SLA is documented in the Microsoft Online Services Level Agreement. The agreement is publicly accessible from Microsoft here. You should reference this document as authoritative and not my blog. I’m not a lawyer and the agreement is between Microsoft and the customer, but here is a breakdown of the key points.

image

The Document outlines 3 SLA’s, all with the same 99.9% uptime SLA.

  • Core service – Presence, Chat Messaging and Online Meetings
  • Microsoft Calling Plans and PSTN Audio Conferencing
  • Voice Quality – If impacted by the Microsoft network and only if the user is used a wired Teams IP Phone

There is no specific SLA for “Phone System” and related PSTN services like Cloud Auto-Attendant and Call Queues.

If customers also have direct routing, they will have to consider the SLA on their direct routing and PSTN carrier to get a complete picture of the SLA for their users. These services would not be provided by Microsoft.

Microsoft Teams Presence, Messaging and Online Meetings SLA – 99.9%

Microsoft provides service credits if service availability falls below

Monthly Uptime Percentage

Service Credit

< 99.9%

25%

< 99%

50%

< 95%

100%

So Microsoft is offering a service credits SLA against a 99.9 Uptime per month SLA, which is up to 43 minutes 49.7 seconds downtime per month before it’s breached. This is in line with most of the other Office 365 services that also offer a 99.9% SLA.

How is uptime calculated?

Monthly Uptime Percentage: The Monthly Uptime Percentage is calculated using the following formula:

image

Where Downtime is measured in user-minutes for each month,

Downtime is defined as any period of time when end users are unable to see presence status, conduct instant messaging conversations, or initiate online meetings

Downtime is the sum of the length (in minutes) of each Incident that occurs during that month multiplied by the number of users impacted by that Incident.

The number of users impacted is important. if not all users are impacted, it’s only a multiple of the minutes of the users that are impacted.

Microsoft Teams – Calling Plans and Audio Conferencing SLA – 99.9%

Microsoft Teams also offers a specific SLA for Callings Plans and Audio Conferencing. These are Microsoft’s PSTN carrier services.

Monthly Uptime Percentage

Service Credit

< 99.9%

25%

< 99%

50%

< 95%

100%

Monthly Uptime Percentage: The Monthly Uptime Percentage is calculated with the same formula

image

Downtime is defined as any period of time when end users are unable to initiate a PSTN call or unable to dial into conference audio via the PSTN.

Microsoft Teams – Voice Quality SLA 99.9%

This SLA applies to any eligible call placed by any voice service user within the subscription (enabled for making any type of call VOIP or PSTN).

Additional Definitions:

Eligible Call” is a Microsoft Teams placed call (within a subscription) that meets both conditions below:

· The call was placed from a Microsoft Teams Certified IP Desk phones on wired Ethernet

· Packet Loss, Jitter and Latency issues on the call were due to networks managed by Microsoft.

Total Calls” is the total number of Eligible Calls

Poor Quality Calls” is the total number of Eligible Calls that are classified as poor based on numerous factors that could impact call quality in the networks managed by Microsoft. While the current Poor Call classifier is built primarily on network parameters like RTT (Roundtrip Time), Packet Loss Rate, Jitter and Packet Loss-Delay Concealment Factors, it is dynamic and continually updated based on new learnings from analysis using millions of Skype, Skype for Business, and Microsoft Teams calls and evolution of Devices, Algorithms and end-user ratings.

Monthly Good Call Rate: The Monthly Good Call Rate is calculated using the following formula:

image

Monthly Good Call Rate

Service Credit

< 99.9%

25%

< 99%

50%

< 95%

100%

How would I claim for credits if I was impacted by a service issue?

In order for Microsoft to consider a claim, you must submit the claim to customer support at Microsoft Corporation including all information necessary for Microsoft to validate the claim, including but not limited to:

  • a detailed description of the Incident
  • information regarding the time and duration of the Downtime
  • the number and location(s) of affected users (if applicable)
  • descriptions of your attempts to resolve the Incident at the time of occurrence.

Will Microsoft notify me of issues?

Microsoft notifies Office 365 administrators by updating the tenant-specific Service Health Dashboard (SHD) on the Office 365 Admin Portal.

Service incident updates are provided on an hourly cadence or, if a different cadence is required, it will be stated in the SHD communication posting.

Recent worldwide Office 365 uptimes

Microsoft doesn’t report on Microsoft Teams uptimes specifically or break out any Office 365 service uptimes. However, they do report publicly on Office 365 uptime as a whole here.

image

Of course, this is for the whole of Office 365, so it’s calculating the minutes of downtime for all the Office 365 users and since Office 365 is comprised of lots of individual services, any single service could go below these averages and have no real impact on the overall Office 365 global uptime percentage. Individual customers may experience higher or lower uptime percentages compared to the global uptime numbers depending on location and usage patterns.

Reference:

Microsoft Online Services Level Agreement

http://www.microsoftvolumelicensing.com/SLA.

Sourced from: TomTalks Blog. View the original article here.

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