Your SLA Is Lying to You: Why Availability Metrics No Longer Cut It

You’ve hit your 99.9% uptime target. Congrats. But users are still frustrated, support tickets are piling up, and leadership keeps asking, “Why does it feel slow?”  

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your SLA is lying to you. 

This blog post is based on our webinar “From Frustration to Satisfaction: The Future of IT End-User Experience”. Click the picture below to view it on-demand. 

Green Dashboards. Red Flags. 

SLAs are supposed to give peace of mind. They promise availability, maybe even response times. But they don’t promise satisfaction. 

They don’t account for: 

• Pages that load but don’t respond. Just because a page is technically up doesn’t mean it’s usable. Lag, freezes, or half-rendered elements frustrate users quickly.
• Frustrated users quietly abandoning their sessions. Not every user complains—most simply leave. That silent churn never shows up on your SLA report.
• Regional outages your data center never saw. You might see uptime in Oslo while users in Dublin are hitting a wall due to misrouted traffic or edge failures.
• Sluggish performance from third-party scripts. Ads, analytics, or chat widgets can drag down your entire experience—without tripping a single SLA threshold.

And they certainly don’t measure how people feel when using your services. 

In short: your SLAs are green, but your users are seeing red. 

The Observability Gap 

SLAs measure infrastructure. But they don’t measure the experience. 

Take this real-world scenario: a customer tries to access their bank account. The page doesn’t load. They refresh, try a new browser, nothing works. Eventually, they tweet in frustration. The bank checks their systems: “All green.” Turns out, traffic was getting misrouted through another continent. 

It wasn’t visible from the inside. But it was painfully obvious to the user. 

Enter Experience-First Monitoring 

Forward-thinking IT teams are expanding their view. They’re combining new methods and perspectives to fill the gap: 

• Synthetic Monitoring simulates user actions across key locations to detect problems before your customers do.
• Real-User Monitoring (RUM) captures actual user sessions, revealing how real people interact with your systems—what works, what lags, and where they drop off.
• Experience KPIs like Visual Complete, APDEX, and Core Web Vitals provide a more meaningful view of performance that actually reflects satisfaction.
• DEX Insights uncover internal frustrations by analyzing how employees interact with business-critical apps and systems.

Why? Because what you can’t see will hurt you. And SLAs are increasingly blind. 

Make SLAs Useful Again  

We’re not saying ditch SLAs. We’re saying: rethink them. 

Define Service Level Indicators (SLIs) that reflect real user experience. Build Service Level Objectives (SLOs) around performance that matters—like how fast a user can log in, or how long your checkout page takes to become interactive. 

That’s when SLAs stop being a checkbox—and start being a catalyst.

At Kanari, We Know What Works—Because We've Lived It 

We work with Nordic enterprises to make observability human-centric. We bring together performance data, experience metrics, and smart automation to close the gap between technical visibility and user reality. 

We help you: 

• Spot problems before users complain, using proactive synthetic checks and real-time data.
• Correlate infrastructure issues with actual business outcomes—like conversion rates, task completion, or user churn.
• Turn monitoring into action, so your teams fix what matters before it escalates.
• Because your reputation isn’t built on uptime. It’s built on how your users experience you. We know—because we’ve earned the battle scars that prove it.

So yes—your SLA might be lying. But your users never do.