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Apify service levels (SLA)
Apify service levels (SLA)

Learn about the additional services and the SLA we offer in connection with the Apify platform and custom Actor development.

Ondra Urban avatar
Written by Ondra Urban
Updated over a week ago

Apify offers its customers an option to secure their workloads and the quality of their data by purchasing one of our service level packages. Thanks to a service level agreement (SLA), you can rest assured that your Actors will be maintained in a timely and efficient manner by our professional team of consultants and developers.

Available SLA variants

We offer three distinct SLA levels: Basic, Advanced and Ultimate. Even the best web scrapers fail thanks to website updates, redesigns, new A/B tests or anti-scraping protections. Continuous monitoring and maintenance is required for optimal performance of any long-term web scraping project.

Basic SLA

The Basic SLA is the cost-efficient choice. Best suited for projects where data requirements are small or infrequent, and where your integrations don’t depend on timely and precise data delivery. If you can wait a few days or a week before a failing Actor is updated, this is the SLA for you. We will promptly identify and fix anything that’s broken, but we won’t periodically secure your Actors against failure.

Advanced SLA

Our Advanced SLA is the best option for most projects. You will get faster turnaround times from our team, but most importantly our Proactive monitoring. This means that we will actively work to prevent your Actors from failing, even if they’re still running fine. Learn more about Proactive monitoring.

Ultimate SLA

With our Ultimate SLA, you can rest assured that your mission-critical workloads will run smoothly, get real-time Proactive monitoring, and that incidents will be resolved as fast as humanly possible. Plus, the cost of all fixes and updates is already included in the price. This is the maximum level of service we provide to our most demanding customers.

No SLA

You can always choose to get no SLA at all. This could be a good choice for one-time projects, where long-term result quality is not a concern. We will deliver your Actors per specification even without an SLA. But if your target website changes structure two weeks later, you will have to wait a few weeks for an update, because we won’t have developer capacity reserved for you.


Summary of SLA options

No SLA

Basic SLA

Advanced SLA

Ultimate SLA

Actor Performance

no guarantee after Actor handover

best-effort performance based on the specification

guaranteed performance based on the specification

guaranteed performance based on the specification

Availability

no guarantee

99,5%

99,5%

99,9%

Maintenance

no

yes, deducted from prepaid hours

yes, deducted from prepaid hours

all fixes and updates are included

Monitoring

no

Reactive

Proactive

Proactive

Reaction Time

not guaranteed

3 business days

next business day

same business day

Response Time

not guaranteed

next business day

same business day

2 business hours

Warranty

3 months

duration of SLA + 3 months

duration of SLA + 6 months

duration of SLA + 12 months

Explanation of key terms

In this section we describe the key SLA terms in simplified language. For detailed definitions please refer to our Service Level Agreement.

Actor Performance

Whether it’s regular product data from e-commerce websites or real-time updates of stocks, you expect a certain level of quality from your Actors. Actor Performance is a set of metrics like required amount of results, response times, or run times of your Actors. Those metrics are defined in your project specification and our monitoring system sends out alerts if they deteriorate or dip below the agreed level.

Depending on the level of SLA you choose, we will either use best effort, or guarantee the Actor Performance. When Actor Performance is guaranteed, we will compensate you for degraded quality. Guaranteed Actor Performance always comes with Proactive monitoring.

Availability

Even the best online platforms sometimes experience downtime. Availability of 99.5% means that we guarantee you will be able to use the Apify platform, start your Actors, download your datasets, and use other platform features at least 99.5% of the time. If we fail to meet this requirement, we will compensate you.

Maintenance

Websites can change at any moment, causing scrapers to break. When you purchase an SLA, we will keep your Actors updated and running even if your target website gets redesigned or adds new anti-scraping capabilities. On the Basic and Advanced plans, you will pre-purchase discounted developer hours which will be used for the maintenance. With the Ultimate SLA, all maintenance hours are included in the price of the SLA.

Monitoring

Monitoring the performance of Actors, their success rates, number of results, and speed is critical for early identification of issues. When you purchase an SLA, we will monitor your Actors and we will fix issues with them automatically, even if you don't report them.

We offer two variants of monitoring. Reactive and Proactive. Both variants guarantee that a developer will start working on a fix within the agreed Reaction time from receiving a monitoring alert.

Reactive monitoring

With this level of monitoring the Apify team will monitor the results of your regular Actor runs. Whenever Actor Performance dips below the agreed level, we will allocate developers to update the Actor to once again perform in accordance with the specification.

Proactive monitoring

With Proactive monitoring your Actors will be regularly tested, health-checked and dry-ran on your target websites. This dramatically increases the chances that your production runs will succeed, despite frequent website changes. Whenever possible, we will identify and fix issues before they can manifest in your production runs. We would love to say always, but if a website changes a few minutes before your regular Actor run, or even during the run itself, no level of monitoring can help against that.

Reaction Time

The latest possible moment when we start working on a solution. Among other things this means the time to allocate a developer to your issue or change request. Note that this does not mean time to issue resolution. Some requests may take minutes to finish, while others can take days or weeks. We will always inform you about the expected time to completion.

Without an SLA, we won't be able to reserve developer capacity for you. If you need a change or a fix, it will usually take 4 weeks before we can allocate a developer, but even that is not guaranteed.

Response Time

We guarantee that we will respond to your requests sent via email, Slack or other channels within the agreed response time. Simple as that. That does not mean that we will immediately have a solution ready for you, but we will acknowledge your request and propose next steps.

Customers without an SLA have no guaranteed response time. We usually respond to their requests within 3 business days, but it may take longer based on current capacity of our team.

Warranty

Our Actors come with a limited warranty for bugs. For detailed terms of the Warranty, please see the Service Level Agreement, but in short, if Actor Performance falls below the agreed level, even though the target website or other external factors haven’t changed at all, it means the Actor is bugged and we will fix it, free of charge, during the Warranty period. This also applies to issues with the Apify platform that cause an otherwise correctly implemented Actor to miss its Actor Performance thresholds.

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