Service Level Targets

Service Level Targets (SLTs) are the goals that you set for response time and availability. Some SLTs define the expectations between customers and the IT organization. For example, the email server must be available 99.9% of all business hours. Other targets fall under the domain of Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) that define expectations among various internal support teams, such as Level I and Level II support.

Process targets set goals for service desk interactions, incidents, change requests, problems, and user requests. They define the amount of time required to move the record from one state to another. For example, the status of an incident must change from Open to Work in progress within 3 hours.

Service targets define the percentage of availability during a month, or the maximum amount of time for a single outage. For example, an email server must be available 99.999% of the time during normal work hours.

Service Level Target catalog

The first step to implement Service Level Management is to create a catalog of pre-defined response and availability service goals called Service Level Targets (SLTs). The catalog contains SLT templates that you can apply to any Service Level Agreement (SLA).

SLT catalog records always contain the SLT name and SLT type (process or service), and may include the following information:

  • Configuration Item
  • Service and status
  • Schedule
  • Availability
  • Escalations
  • Text description

The process to define SLT templates is separate from the process to define a service agreement. Service Level Management stores all SLT templates in the slocatalog table. When you create or edit a service agreement, you can add SLTs from the template catalog, customize them, or you can define new ones.