A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract between a service provider and its internal or external customers that documents what services the provider will furnish and defines the service standards the provider is obligated to meet.

Each organization has its own Outage Handling Procedures—depending on whether it is planned or unplanned downtime. Most DBAs are assigned a database to be the primary contact when there is an outage issue on call. Outage handling usually includes something similar to the following:

• Initial troubleshooting to determine the type of outage: Evaluate any automatic failover procedures to check for success.
• Forecasting the amount of time before resolution: This is the point for making the decision if a manual failover is needed.
• Bringing the application or database back online: Not all failures are due to the database being down, even when that is what first appears to be the case.
• Root cause analysis: What was the real reason for the outage? This is not always evident at first glance.
• Future preventive actions: Evaluating and rewriting the outage procedures, reassigning team members for outage coverage.