Service agreements overview

Service agreements come in three types. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) describes the agreed level of service between service providers and customers. It defines service goals and responsibilities for Configuration Items (CIs). An SLA is an external document between the IT department and its customer. An Operational Level Agreement (OLA) is an internal document describing the level of service among the departments within an organization. An Underpinning Contract (UC) is an external document describing the level of service between an organization and a third-party vendor/supplier. While all agreements are equal, UCs and OLAs are created to support the implementation of an SLA.

These service agreements define the following aspects of service management:

  • Availability, which describes the availability of a CI within a specified time frame.
  • Response, which describes the performance targets.

Service agreements are monitored automatically to continuously recalculate availability and response metrics. Service Manager applications provide availability and response metrics to Service Level Management. For example, Service Level Management summarizes outage information from incidents and change requests to determine the performance of service guarantees for affected CIs.

Service Manager integrates service agreement support into Change Management (changes and tasks), Incident Management (incidents and tasks), Problem Management (problems and tasks), Request Fulfillment (requests and tasks) and Service Desk. Administrators can use these metrics to help prioritize incident resolution, schedule tasks, and escalate incidents when the service agreement is in jeopardy.

Related topics

Service Level Management
Why are service agreements important?
Service Level Targets
Service Level Target catalog
Application integration
Linking application records to service agreements
Calculating response time

Related topics

Access Service Level Agreements from Configuration Management