Your phone buzzes with an incoming text message right when you’re about to start dinner. Inconvenient, but better than a 3 am call. It’s an Uptime.com Alert, and if you want to clear it before your dinner gets cold you need the right tools for investigation… If that scenario sounds familiar to you, then you’re in good (if tired) company.

If you’ve ever had a website or service go down as you were using it, then you’ll understand the irritation of a generic error message and a plea to “Be patient!” (if you’re lucky). It’s almost like they know they’re not telling you the full story. The companies that are on top of their outage game will have a prepared link or redirect to their Status Page (or at least, have one prominently displayed on their pages and social media) for times like these.

Service Level Agreements are designed to foster trust between your customers and your business. They help define the maximum amount of downtime your team finds acceptable. While they can have legal repercussions, SLAs are fundamentally about trust. Your customers use your service because you’re the best at what you do. They remain loyal because they trust you to do what they need. Retention in SaaS is very fickle, and competition in certain spaces is quite stiff.