7. vCloud Service Control : 7.1 vCloud Service Governance and Lifecycle Management : 7.1.2 Service Level Management : 7.1.2.1. Definition of Service Level Agreement
   
7.1.2.1. Definition of Service Level Agreement
A service level agreement (SLA) is a predetermined agreement between the service consumer and the service provider that measures the quality and performance of the available services. SLAs can be of many types, from measuring pure service availability to measuring response time for service components, process workflows, and as experienced by the users.
There are services running at every layer of the vCloud stack, so service consumers might be business users or internal IT groups who access the vCloud primarily for technology and infrastructure services. In cases where SLAs are established for base technology services that are not consumed directly by business users but are needed to make sure that downstream operations and infrastructure components support the business users’ SLAs, these agreements are referred to as Operational Level Agreements (OLAs).