Appendix A - VASEES SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS RFI.pdf

Appendix A: Service Level Agreements

VASEES SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS (SLA)

The Contractor shall ensure that its services shall conform to the following VASEES SLA parameters:

1. Engineering Response

The Contractor shall acknowledge via email and phone and provide an initial engineering response to all Engineering Requests submitted within two (2) hours to VA PM and COR.

The Contractor shall address all engineering responses in the after-action report and include the results in the Weekly Status Report.

Engineering Requests shall be submitted and logged through the service desk, and time to respond begins when the change management ticket is submitted to the Contractor and when all ticket information is complete.

2. 24x7x 365 Network Monitoring Responses

The Contractor shall notify the VA Stakeholders for acknowledgement of outage and PM or COR for awareness by email and phone of an VASEES System Network outage within 15 minutes or less.

The Contractor shall calculate “Network Monitoring Delayed Response Time” for each calendar month and include the results in the Weekly Progress Report. “Network Monitoring Delayed Response Time” means each instance that the Contractor exceeds the 30 minutes Response Time for a specific affected Network Element.

3. 99.9% Service Availability Guarantee

The Contractor shall provide 99.9% Service Availability. Service Availability shall be defined as all VASEES Services and applications in the government approved cloud environments shall be available 99.9% of the time, whether it is during abnormal system operation or software upgrade regardless of hardware, software, or user fault. Upon identification of a primary system failure, the Contractor shall inform the VA Stakeholders for acknowledgement of failure, and PM or COR for awareness via email and phone within 5 minutes of the need to initiate failover to the secondary site which shall occur and be fully operational within 15 minutes of failover initiation.

The Contractor shall provide an availability of 99.9% for VASEES Applications as set forth in the Performance Work Statement (PWS) If the Contractor notifies the COR that it has determined that the VA’s infrastructure temporarily inhibits the ability to provide this level of performance, this SLA shall be suspended until the VA and the Contractor agree upon and implement a new or modified configuration designed to provide this level of performance.

4. Monitor Load and Utilization on the entire VASEES System.

The Contractor shall monitor, measure, and assure updates to support for ongoing changes or modifications, do not exceed the following utilization and load:

Type: CPU Load SLA: Not to exceed 50% over 5 min Calculation: Dynatrace

Type: Memory Utilization SLA: Not to exceed 70% Calculation: Dynatrace

5. Support Response Time and Severity Levels.

The Contractor shall provide technical support twenty-four (24) hours a day, seven (7) days a week, and three-hundred and sixty-five (365) days a year to assist the VA with issues pertaining to the VASEES set forth in this contract. Response Times begin when monitoring alerts are discovered and validated or when the Contractor receives a support request from the VA. The Contractor shall respond to validated monitoring alerts and the VAs support requests according to the following Severity Levels:

VASEES SLA Tier II and Tier III Resolution Matrix

VASEES SLA

Tier II and

Tier III Resolution

Matrix Priority

Response Time Resolution Time Goal

Response Time Threshold

1 – Critical 30 minutes 1 Day 90% 2 – Serious 1 Hour 2 Days 90%

3 – Moderate 4 Hours 3 Days 90% 4 – Minimal 1 Day 5 Days 90%

Priority 1 = Critical: System unavailable 2 = Serious: System delay, possible impact on business function or service 3 = Moderate: System not operating within design specifications 4 = Minimal: Request for service (no business impact)

6. System and Network Performance and Monitoring:

a. Acceptable levels of performance shall be validated and baseline within 30 days of contract award and agreed to by both the VA Stakeholders, PM, COR, and the Contractor. The VA Stakeholders, PM, COR, and the Contractor will determine an appropriate mechanism for routine testing and reporting to ensure the agreed to performance levels are sustained on an ongoing basis. The testing mechanism will be documented and reviewed by both the VA Stakeholders, PM, COR, and the Contractor as needed.

b. How Measured: Once the VA Stakeholders, PM, COR, and the Contractor have agreed to the acceptable performance levels and the mechanism in which they will be reported, the Contactor shall execute the validation tests and report the findings monthly.

Event Escalation: If in the execution of the monthly test the Contractor finds the performance levels have fallen below the agreed to acceptable levels; the Contactor shall conduct root cause analysis in accordance with the root cause analysis (RCA) requirements in the PWS section 5.5.5.1.

7. Service Credits

If the Contractor does not meet the 99.9% Availability requirement, VA may, at the sole discretion of the Contracting Officer, apply for a service credit (“Service Credit”) from the Contractor. The Service Credit will consist of a deduction against the Contractor’s future invoices in an amount agreed upon between the Contractor and VA as defined within the table below. The amount of the Service Credit should be determined in relation to the respective accumulated statistics (e.g., Availability) for the month(s) during which the non-conforming SLA standard was not met by the Contractor.

Service Credit will be credited to VA’s account in the form of a credit to VA’s bill/invoice during the next monthly billing cycle beginning no less than 10 business days after approval in accordance with the below table. In the event the Contractor and the VA cannot reach agreement on a Service Credit within 60 days of the VA’s request, or the Contracting Officer does not apply for such a credit, neither the VA nor the Contractor will have waived, forfeited, or foreclosed any other legal, regulatory, statutory, contractual, and equitable remedies.

Measured Availability Performance

Monthly Service Credit

≥99.9% N/A

99.8% - 99.89% 5%

99.6% - 99.79% 10%

99.4% - 99.59% 15%

99.0% - 99.39% 20%

Less than 99.0% 25%