ASGC Common Service Level Agreement

Document Status and Date: FINAL version on 28 Sep. 2019

This work by ASGC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

This template is based on work, which was released under a Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution License (CC BY 4.0). It is part of the FitSM Standard family for lightweight IT service management, freely available at www.fitsm.eu.

This Common Level Service Level Agreement (SLA), the Agreement, is valid for all ASGC services provided to support research applications, if no other agreements are in place. The Agreement may be extended or replaced by specific SLAs.

Service hours and exceptions

All facilities and research applications provided by ASGC are in general delivered during 24 hours per day, 7 days per week basis (i.e. 365 days or 8,760 hours), to seamlessly support research operations. Planned and announced interruptions may reduce the effective operating time of a service. The following exceptions apply:

Customer will be notified via e-mail in a timely manner, (i.e. 24 hours before the start of the outage), about the planned maintenance windows or service interruptions (“scheduled downtimes”).
Downtime periods exceeding 24 hours need justification.
Human services are provided during support hours.

Support

The services covered by the scope of this Agreement are provided with the following level of support. Support is provided via ASGC Service Desk. Access requires a valid SSO account. Support is available between:

Monday and Friday.
9:00 and 18:00 CST (UTC/GMT+8 hours) time. This excludes public holidays at the same time in all organizations providing the service.

Incident handling

The Quality of Support level is defined as follow:

Medium level:

Incident priority	Response Time
Less urgent	3 working days
Urgent	2 working days
Very urgent	1 working day
Top priority	< 1 working day

Response time is provided as service level target.

Service requests

In addition to resolving incidents, standard service requests will be fulfilled through the defined support channels in the same way as incidents. Service requests are classified as “Less urgent”.

Service level targets

Monthly Availability

Defined as the ability of a service or service component to fulfill its intended function at a specific time or over a calendar month.
Average service level target (as a percentage per month): 90%
Minimum (as a percentage per month): 80%

Monthly Reliability

Defined as the ability of a service or service component to fulfil its intended function at a specific time or over a calendar month, excluding scheduled maintenance periods.
Average service level target (as a percentage per month): 95%
Minimum (as a percentage per month): 85%

Quality of Support level

Medium: The incidents, based on their priority, will be responded to with the response times described in section 2.1

Limitations and constraints

The provisioning of the service under the agreed service level targets is subject to the following limitations and constraints:

Support is provided in following language: Chinese and English
Downtimes caused due to upgrades for fixing critical security issues are not considered Agreement violations.
Force Majeure. A party shall not be liable for any failure of or delay in the performance of this Agreement for the period that such failure or delay is due to causes beyond its reasonable control. Means any
- fire, flood, earthquake or natural phenomena,
- war, embargo, riot, civil disorder, rebellion, revolution
which is beyond the ASGC’s control, or any other causes beyond the ASGC’s control.

Violations

In case of violations of the agreed Services targets for three consecutive months, ASGC will investigate root cause of the violation. The Customer should notify the supporting Resource Centres in case of suspected violation via the ASGC Service Desk. The case will be analysed to identify the cause and verify the violation.

Information security and data protection

The following rules for information security and data protection apply:

Assertion of absolute security in IT systems is impossible. ASGC is making every effort to maximize security level of users’ data and minimalize possible harm in the event of an incident.
The Customer must meet all requirements of any relevant ASGC and AS policies or proceduresand also must be compliant with the relevant national legislation.