Managing SLA Policies

A Service-Level Agreement (SLA) is a contract that sets expectations between a service provider and a customer. It is a framework outlining the services you will deliver to your client under specific criteria. The purpose of an SLA management system is to keep track of these contracts, notify the respective stakeholders and help them take necessary steps when there is a deviation from the policies outlined. It is crucial to define what constitutes a justified level of service, and its negligence makes an organization feeble against its consumers.

The SLA dictates the different elements of your contract with your customers, including metrics like your availability for them, response and issue resolution times, the quality of your services rendered, and much more. For instance, to assure customers a response from support within 24 hours, 99.5% service uptime, or 85% first-call resolution. In addition to formalizing service expectations, the SLA sets forth the terms of redress when conditions are breached. Ultimately, SLA is an agreement between you and your customer that defines the minimum expected responsiveness and service requirements and how to measure the performance. It is recommended to revise the SLAs regularly to ensure you're measuring the right things over time.

Types of SLAs

Creating SLAs is the primary initiative in building a relationship between customers and service providers. The SLA brings a sense of clarity on what to expect from each party, concluding the bargain.

Significance of SLAs

SLAs are a fundamental agreement between your customers and the IT team, which is critical in strengthening the relationship. Implementing SLAs in an organization promotes mutual understanding of service expectations.

Basic Components

This module revolves around the following components: An SLA is a contract or formal commitment between a service provider and customer.

Overview

Generally, IT teams prioritize tickets in numerous ways considering facts like who raised the issue, the part of the business impacted, and others. The application is highly flexible so as to accommodate the definition of SLA performance goals or policies based on any combination of parameters you specify.

Working with SLAs

An SLA is an agreement between a service provider and its customer that defines how their relationship will work progressively. Understanding SLA structure and management gives an organization the potential to deliver on its promises.

Ranking SLA Policies

Ranking SLA policies means defining the execution order of them. Any organization must create a priority order for the SLA policies in coherence with the business requirements.

Other Configurations

As a part of SLA policy creation, certain configurations are done while setting up or defining its components. Majorly, it is required to configure conditions to confirm the execution of a particular process or action.

Illustrating SLA Policy Application

The SLA policies created in this module are ideal for notifying the concerned stakeholders on the inconsistencies across the application. In this module, you can create SLA policies that apply to any module irrespective of its features and functionalities.