This. We talked to our account reps and engineering folks at GitHub - they had no monitoring to track if they had kept their end of the contracted SLA.

They expected us to log any faults and as you say the process wasn't worth it - even with massive outages - just for a few beans in credits.

GitHub has low availability simply because it doesn't cost them and they wear no legal or contractual damage from it.

If a competitor came to me and said, we will _pay_ you damages for the time your developers are offline not able to use our product to do their jobs, we would sign up immediately.