]po[ SLA Management

This "SLA Management" package allows to define and track parameters of service level agreement contracts. It defines the notion of "Service Level Agreement (SLA)", "SLA Parameter", "SLA Indicator", "SLA Service Hours" and "ticket resolution time".

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

A ]po[ SLA is a special type of project that represents a service contract between the provider (the organization running the ]po[ instance) and a customer. The SLA serves as a kind of container for all tickets related to the customer:

• Service Container:
  The SLA allows to see the history of all tickets related to a customer.
  
  
• Financial Container:
  Service staff can log hours on a ticket. These hours will be aggregated on the SLA level and allows for time and material based timesheet invoicing.
  
  
• Permission Container:
  The SLA controls access permissions to the individual tickets. Only "members" of the SAL and users with the privilege [add tickets for customer] are allowed to to create new tickets of an SLA. This allows to implement a customer self-service portal by adding the customer contacts as members to the SLA.
  

Service Level Parameter

The [SLA parameter object type] represents a parameter of a real-world SLA contract. For example, an SLA might prescribe the maximum resolution time of incidents as a function of the type of incident and its priority.

Service Level Indicator

SLA indicators are instances of the Indicator object type as defined in the Reporting Indicators package. An indicator basically consists of an SQL statement that returns a single value.

"Associating" a SLA indicator with a SLA parameter allows to track the value of a SLA parameter. The values of the SLA parameter are then available as variables for the indicator SQL statement. This way it is possible to track for example the resolution time of the SLA parameter "Max. resolution time for 'bug request' tickets is 4 hours". Defining green/yellow/red low- and high watermark values allows manager to visually track the SLA performance. Future versions of ]po[ will allow to attach notifications to SLA indicators when reaching yellow or red levels.

Service Hours

Service Hours define the time range for an SLA.

Ticket Resolution Time

Based on the definition of service hours, ]po[ [calculates the resolution time] of a ticket as the service hours elapsed while a ticket is in status "open" (or in one of the sub-states of "open").