Incidents and Service Level AgreementsIncidents and Service Level AgreementsA service level agreement (SLA) between a service provider and its customers specifies service commitments that the service provider agrees to meet. For each SLA, you create commitments. The SLAs are matched to the incident in the same way that the system matches a customer agreement. Each SLA specifies such criteria as priority, affected person, classification, service or service group, and so on.
For example, you might have commitments such as the following:
Response time of 5 minutes and resolution time of 15 minutes when the priority is 1, the affected person is a senior executive, and the asset type is laptop.
Response time of 30 minutes and resolution time of 60 minutes when the priority is 3, the classification is IT Support, and the asset type is copy machine.
For each commitment, you can establish escalation actions or notifications that occur if the commitment might not be met. An escalation process can monitor all activities and send notifications or perform other activities to ensure that commitments are met.
Your system administrator determines whether you can apply one or more than one SLA to a ticket or work order. If you can apply more than one SLA, the system administrator determines which SLA updates the target time fields. The administrator determines whether the highest-ranked SLA or the SLA with the most stringent commitment updates the fields.
There are several ways in which SLAs are applied to tickets or work orders:
The system might apply an SLA via a workflow or escalation process, or via another SLA.
You can use the Apply SLA action, which lets the system choose and apply the most appropriate SLA or SLAs for the record.
You can use the Select / Deselect SLA action to remove or select an SLA.
For more information about SLAs, see the Service Level Agreements (SP) help.
The SLA is applicable to records with values that match criteria on the SLA. The less specific the SLA, the more records to which it is potentially applicable, and vice versa. For example, if there is no customer associated with an SLA, the SLA can be matched to an incident for any customer.
When you apply an SLA to a ticket or work order, the system uses logic to select an applicable SLA. The conditions on applicable SLAs match the following conditions on a ticket or work order:
record type and
customer and
classification and priority and
service or service groups and
conditions specified in conditions fields and the condition builder and
organization, site, a location, or a location within a specified location hierarchy and
asset type, asset, or an asset within a specified asset hierarchy
For more information about matching SLAs to other records, see the Service Level Agreements (SP) help.