Service levels
What 24/7 actually means
Every managed provider claims round-the-clock coverage. Very few explain what is happening at four in the morning, how fast a human answers, or what they are careful not to promise. This page does all three.
While nobody is watching
Monitoring and automated maintenance
Not somebody staring at a screen. Scripts running on every machine we cover, fixing overnight the things that would otherwise be your morning.
Deferred Patching, on a schedule you can see
Operating system and third-party application updates are tested, then deployed in waves outside working hours. Machines that miss a window are chased rather than forgotten, which is where most 'we have automatic updates on' firms actually fail.
Performance maintenance
Temporary files, orphaned installers, stale profiles, browser caches and startup clutter are cleared on a cycle. This is the difference between a four-year-old machine that still feels fine and one everyone complains about.
Health checks that run before you notice and alert us to potential issues before they actually become issues
Disk health and free space, memory pressure, failed services, event log errors, battery condition and uptime. A disk that is beginning to fail usually says so for weeks first, and reacting in week one is dramatically cheaper than reacting in week six.
Self-healing for the boring failures
Stopped services restarted, stalled agents recovered, print spoolers cleared, failed backups retried. A large share of the tickets a firm would normally raise never become tickets at all.
Configuration drift correction
Protection disabled, a firewall turned off, encryption switched off, an unauthorised remote-access tool installed. We put it back and tell you it happened.
Reporting that a human reads
The point of automation is not the dashboard. Every month you get a short summary of what ran, what was fixed without you knowing, and the one or two things that need a decision.
The practical result is that a well-maintained four-year-old machine keeps feeling like a two-year-old one, and a meaningful share of the tickets a firm would normally raise never become tickets at all.
Response targets
How fast a human picks it up
Priority is decided by how much it is hurting you, not by who is asking. Anything that looks like a security incident starts at the top regardless of how few people it affects.
The targets below are the same whatever you pay. The one place membership changes anything is a tie: if every technician is already busy and two tickets sit at the same priority, the higher membership level goes first, then it is the order they arrived in. That is a queue we would rather you never see.
- P1
The business has stopped
Nobody can work, or something is actively causing harm right now. A suspected security incident is always P1 regardless of how many people it affects.
- Human responds
- 1-5 minutes
- Work begins
- 5-15 minutes
- P2
A team or a critical function is blocked
Several people cannot do part of their job, or one person cannot do any of theirs, and there is no workaround.
- Human responds
- 5 minutes
- Work begins
- 5-30 minutes
- P3
One person is affected, and there is a way around it
Something is wrong and annoying, but the work can still happen today.
- Human responds
- 5-30 minutes
- Work begins
- 1-2 business hours
- P4
Planned and scheduled
Requests with a date rather than an urgency — new starters, new hardware, changes you have asked us to make.
- Human responds
- As Scheduled / 5 Minutes Early
- Work begins
- As Scheduled
Examples, so nobody has to guess
P1
- The office cannot reach the internet or the main system
- A server, critical software, or other infrastructure is down
- Suspected ransomware, account takeover or data exposure
- A payment or wire has been redirected
P2
- A department cannot reach a shared drive or application
- A partner's laptop will not start before a hearing
- Email is delivering slowly or being rejected
- A backup has failed and not recovered
P3
- A single machine is running slowly
- A printer or scanner is not working
- An application needs reinstalling or reconfiguring
- A password or access needs resetting
P4
- Setting up a new employee
- Ordering, building and delivering a new machine
- A requested configuration change
- Questions, advice and how-to help
Business hours are 9am to 5pm Pacific, Monday to Friday.The phone is answered whenever it rings. The response targets below are business-hours targets, and work that starts outside those hours — including a consultation call — is billable at the emergency escalation rate unless your scope of work says otherwise.Some providers charge more for this, some charge less, and plenty do not answer at all. If it cannot wait until morning and it has woken someone up, there is a price attached, and we would rather print that than surprise you with it.
Specific targets and inclusions may vary with your service level agreement and agreed scope.
Straight answers
What we deliberately do not promise
This is the part worth reading. Anyone can publish a response time.
We commit to response, not to resolution
How long a fix takes depends on hardware arriving, a vendor answering, or a cloud platform recovering — none of which we control. Promising a resolution time would mean promising something that is not ours to promise. What we do commit to is that a human has it, is working on it, and keeps telling you where it stands.
Priority is set by impact, not by who is asking
A whole office down outranks a partner's printer. We will say so politely, and we will tell you why rather than quietly deprioritising you.
Anything security-related starts at the top
A suspected compromise is always P1, even if it affects one mailbox and nobody is inconvenienced. Detection time is what decides the size of the damage.
After-hours coverage depends on your tier
Monitoring and automated maintenance never stop. Human escalation outside business hours is included from Standard upward and available to Essential clients as billable work. We would rather tell you that plainly than imply everyone gets everything.
Targets on this page describe our standard agreement. Your signed agreement is the document that governs, and where the two differ, it wins. Ask us for a copy before you sign anything — we will send it.
Not sure where you stand?
Start with the six-point check, or book twenty minutes and talk it through with someone who will tell you plainly what needs doing and what does not.
Or call 1-855-966-2967