A green status page is not an SLA measurement
A service-wide indicator and your own request history describe different things.
The mechanism
An operational status page is useful context, but it may aggregate regions, products and observation windows. Your application’s experience can differ because of the endpoint, network path, timeout policy or workload. Availability claims need a defined measurement boundary.
Put it into practice
For a service agreement, record the endpoint, sampling interval, success condition and treatment of partial failures. Preserve individual observations before calculating a percentage. If a dashboard excludes planned maintenance, say so alongside the result. The goal is not to replace the provider’s account with another unexplained number; it is to make both accounts comparable.
A measurement-window example
Consider a hypothetical monitor that sends one request each minute for an hour. A percentage computed from those 60 observations describes that sampling rule and endpoint. It does not establish the outcome of every request made by every customer during the hour. Report the count, window and success definition with the percentage, rather than publishing an isolated uptime number.
Decide the incident rules in advance
Explain how planned maintenance, network errors and partial responses are classified. If the monitor itself fails, distinguish missing observations from a service failure. A dashboard can show both the provider’s status and the local measurement, with their different scopes plainly labelled. That is more informative than making one number stand in for every user’s experience.
Keep the evidence in view.
sre.google — source & further reading ↗Checked for this edition on 7 October 2026. Examples are illustrative unless stated otherwise. Read our editorial standards.
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