Service level agreements

A service level agreement (SLA) typically is a written agreement that outlines the commitment between a service provider and its customers. A commitment is a service level that all parties have agreed to, such as asset reliability or availability.

The SLA describes one or more commitments and the escalation actions or notifications associated with each commitment. Escalation actions or notifications might be associated with an SLA to ensure that commitments are met. An escalation process can monitor all activities and send notifications or perform other activities to ensure that commitments are met.

The types of records to which service level agreements can be applied include tickets, such as service requests, and work-based records, such as work orders. Before you can apply an SLA to a record, the record must have a site defined.

A service level agreement can be associated with a record in several ways:

  • An SLA might automatically be applied to a record from within a workflow or escalation process, or from another SLA.
  • You can select an action to apply an SLA, which applies the best match automatically.
  • You can view SLAs and select an action to select or clear the SLAs that you want to manually apply to the record.
When you apply a service level agreement to a record, the following events occur:
  • The SLA Applied check box on the main tab of the record is selected to document the action.
  • Any escalations that are associated with the SLA are activated.
  • The Target Start, Target Finish, and Contact values for the record might be calculated automatically as follows:
    Automatically calculated values
    When an SLA is applied that includes a response commitment, the response commitment date populates the Target Start date field of the record.
    When an SLA is applied that includes a resolution commitment, the resolution commitment date populates the Target Finish date field of the record.
    When an SLA is applied that includes a contact commitment, the contact commitment date populates the Target Contact date field of the record.