How to calculate monthly uptime
For a 30-day month: uptime % = (43,200 minutes − downtime minutes) ÷ 43,200 × 100. A month with 43 minutes of downtime lands at exactly 99.9%; hold it to 4 minutes 19 seconds and you’ve made 99.99%.
Monthly windows are the fairest basis for SLAs: long enough to absorb noise, short enough that a bad incident can’t hide. It’s also the window where most service-credit clauses are evaluated, so measure yours the same way your contracts do.
Use daily uptime as an early warning signal
Daily uptime = (86,400 seconds − downtime seconds) ÷ 86,400 × 100. The granularity is unforgiving: a single 15-minute incident caps the day at 98.96%, well below every common SLA tier.
Daily numbers are most useful as an early-warning signal rather than a reporting metric. A streak of 99.8% days means you’re bleeding budget continuously, usually because of flapping infrastructure or a quietly degrading dependency, even if the monthly average still looks fine.
Downtime allowed at each SLA level
| Uptime | Per day | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 99% Two nines | 14m 24s | 7h 12m | 3d 15h |
| 99.9% Three nines | 1m 26s | 43m 12s | 8h 45m 36s |
| 99.95% | 43s | 21m 36s | 4h 22m 48s |
| 99.99% Four nines | 9s | 4m 19s | 52m 34s |
| 99.999% Five nines | 864ms | 26s | 5m 15s |
| 99.9999% Six nines | 86ms | 3s | 32s |
| 99.9999999% Nine nines | 86μs | 2.6ms | 32ms |
SLA calculation cheatsheet
Availability calculation
Availability (%) = (Total Time - Downtime) / Total Time × 100Example: If a service was down for 7.3 hours in a 30-day month:
- Total Time = 30 days × 24 hours = 720 hours
- Availability = (720 - 7.3) / 720 × 100 = 98.99%
Response time SLA
Response Time Compliance (%) = (Responses Within Threshold / Total Responses) × 100Mean time metrics
- MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) = Total Operational Time / Number of Failures
- MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) = Total Repair Time / Number of Repairs
- MTTA (Mean Time To Acknowledge) = Total Time to Acknowledge / Number of Incidents
Service credit calculation
Service Credit = (Monthly Service Fee) × (Credit Percentage for SLA Breach)SLA penalty example
- If availability drops below 99.9% but remains above 99.0%: 10% credit
- If availability drops below 99.0%: 25% credit
Track SLAs and downtime metrics at a glance
Hyperping reports on service reliability using data collected by your monitors. Select the reporting period, then review the results in the dashboard or export them.
- Track uptime, Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), and SLA compliance for any reporting period.
- Export the selected period as a CSV file for audits, client reports, spreadsheets, or internal analysis.
- Review the complete incident history and use filters to narrow the records included in your report.

SLA & uptime management guides
What is uptime?
Uptime is the amount of time that a service is available and operational, typically expressed as a percentage over a given period such as a month or a year.
What is an SLA?
A service-level agreement (SLA) defines the level of service you expect from a vendor, laying out the metrics by which service is measured, as well as remedies or penalties should agreed-on service levels not be achieved.
How to prevent downtime?
Redundancy, monitoring and alerting are key to ensure a safe and reliable service.
Frequently asked questions
- How do you calculate availability?
- Availability (%) = (Total Time − Downtime) / Total Time × 100. For example, a service that was down 7.3 hours in a 30-day month (720 hours) has an availability of (720 − 7.3) / 720 × 100 = 98.99%.
- How much downtime does 99.95% uptime allow?
- At 99.95% uptime, the maximum allowed downtime is 43 seconds per day, 21 minutes 36 seconds per 30-day month, and 4 hours 22 minutes 48 seconds per 365-day year.
- What's the difference between 99.9% and 99.99% uptime?
- Each additional nine reduces allowed downtime tenfold: 99.9% allows about 8 hours 46 minutes of downtime per year, while 99.99% allows just under 53 minutes. Meeting 99.99% generally requires automated failover, since a human response rarely fits inside the budget.
- How do I track SLA compliance?
- Continuous uptime monitoring measures availability from outside your infrastructure and records every outage. Hyperping checks your endpoints at up to 30-second intervals from multiple regions and reports uptime, MTTR, and SLA compliance over any period.
- How do I calculate monthly uptime from downtime?
- Subtract the month's downtime from the total time in that month, divide the result by the total time, and multiply by 100. Use the actual number of days when reporting a calendar month, or state clearly when your SLA uses a fixed 30-day period.