Automation SLA
A commitment for how quickly and reliably an automation responds or completes.
An automation SLA defines the target speed and reliability for an automated process—how fast it should respond and how often it should succeed. It sets expectations for stakeholders and guides technical design.
In practice, SLAs cover lead response, ticket triage, sync times, or invoice processing. They inform capacity planning, retries, and escalation rules so teams know when to intervene.
SLAs fit into workflows as guardrails: they drive monitoring thresholds, alert policies, and incident response playbooks. Clear SLAs reduce guesswork, protect customer experience, and align teams on acceptable performance.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should an automation SLA include?
Targets for response/processing time, success rate, coverage scope, measurement method, and escalation paths when targets are missed.
How do I measure SLA performance?
Instrument start/finish times, success/failure reasons, and queue depth. Use percentiles (p50/p95) and error budgets to track compliance.
How do SLAs affect system design?
They inform concurrency limits, retry strategies, and fallbacks. Higher SLAs may require redundancy, caching, and more robust error handling.
What happens when an SLA is breached?
Trigger alerts, route to a human, and execute runbooks—pause writes, reroute traffic, or throttle inputs. Log incidents and run postmortems.
How do I set realistic SLA targets?
Benchmark current performance, consider downstream limits, and align with business impact. Start conservative, then tighten as reliability improves.
Should SLAs differ by workflow?
Yes. High-value or time-sensitive workflows (payments, lead response) get tighter SLAs; batch or low-risk tasks can have looser targets.
How do SLAs interact with retries?
Retries improve success rates but can hurt latency. Set retry budgets that respect SLA time limits and avoid hammering dependencies.
Do SLAs apply to third-party services I call?
You inherit their performance. Monitor their latency and errors separately, and add buffers or fallbacks to protect your SLA.
How do I communicate SLAs to stakeholders?
Publish dashboards with uptime/latency, share incident reports, and keep SLAs in onboarding docs and runbooks so teams know what to expect.
Agentic AI
An AI approach where models autonomously plan next steps, choose tools, and iterate toward an objective within guardrails.
Agentic Workflow
A sequence where an AI agent plans, executes tool calls, evaluates results, and loops until success criteria are met.
Agent Handoff
A pattern where one AI agent passes context and state to another specialized agent to keep multi-step automation modular.
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