What uptime percentages really mean
| SLA | Allowed downtime / month | In practice |
|---|---|---|
| 95% | ~36 hours | A camera can be dark for a full weekend and still comply |
| 99% | ~7.3 hours | Reasonable floor for commercial sites |
| 99.5% | ~3.7 hours | Requires monitoring that catches failures same-day |
| 99.9% | ~44 minutes | Only meaningful with automated alerts and fast dispatch |
Pick the number from your risk, not the vendor's brochure: a school gate camera dark for 36 hours is a different problem from a warehouse aisle. And an SLA without measurement is a sentence, not a commitment.
Measure the recording, not just the camera
- Camera online: the device answers on the network.
- Feed healthy: the stream is live, in focus, not obstructed or repositioned.
- Recording verified: the DVR/NVR is writing, storage is not full or failed.
- Retention intact: footage from N days ago is actually retrievable.
- Clock correct: timestamps drift makes footage useless as evidence.
Most footage-is-missing incidents fail on points three to five while every camera LED glows green. An SLA that only counts pings will be met on paper and fail when footage is requested.
Clauses that make the SLA enforceable
- Definition: per-camera recording uptime, measured monthly, with the measurement method named.
- Detection: failures alerted within a stated window, not discovered on the monthly visit.
- Response and restore: separate clocks for acknowledging and for fixing, by severity.
- Reporting: a monthly per-camera uptime report the client receives, not requests.
- Remedy: service credits or fee reduction tied to the measured shortfall.
- Exclusions listed narrowly: power outages and client-side damage, not "technical issues".
Verify independently
The measurement cannot live only in the vendor's hands. Independent monitoring — a platform that watches every camera, DVR and NVR, verifies recording, and logs downtime per device — turns the monthly report into shared ground truth. That is what Camera Monitor does: uptime per camera across sites, alerts when a feed or recorder fails, and the downtime log the SLA settles against.
Common questions
What is a reasonable CCTV uptime SLA?
99% per camera per month (about 7 hours of allowed downtime) is a reasonable commercial floor; go tighter only where the risk justifies same-day dispatch, because vendors price the response speed, not the number.
Should the SLA cover the DVR/NVR and storage too?
Yes — explicitly. Most missing-footage incidents are recorder or storage failures while cameras look fine. Define uptime as recording verified end to end.
How is CCTV uptime actually measured?
Through monitoring that polls each camera and recorder, verifies the stream and recording state, and logs per-device downtime. The method and the report should be named in the contract so both sides read the same number.
Who pays when uptime is missed?
The contract should tie measured shortfall to service credits or fee reduction automatically. Without a stated remedy, an uptime number is decoration.