Implementation Guide › Implementation › How to Create Contracts (Contract Manager)

How to Create Contracts (Contract Manager)

At this stage, the Contracts and their related entities that were defined in the Design phase are created in the system.

Follow these steps:

1. Add new Contract and apply the Contract's general details.
2. For each Contract, define its Metrics and apply their general details.

Only the general details of a Contract's content is applied at this stage, without including the Business Logic and clustering of the Contract's Metrics.

The following description of these steps emphasizes some important points that should be considered at this stage. These steps are described in full detail in the Online Help.

Step 1: Add a new Contract and apply the Contract's general details.

The Contract definition should include:

• Setting the Contract's name.
• Selecting the related Contract Party(s).
• Attaching the related Services.
• Setting the effective dates for the Contract. The effective dates of the contracts are the date range for which the Correlation engine will calculate the service level for this contract; results for reporting are available only for these dates. When setting the dates, it is important to take into account the requirements in terms of the availability of the Contract related reports and the available raw data.
• Setting the Contract Time Zone and Currency. This definition is for reporting purposes and allows for the reporting on this Contract to follow the relevant Time Zone. The currency definition allows the Reporting engine to determine in which currency to display the penalty results for Penalty formulas.

Step 2: Add Metrics-general Details.

Once the Contract is in place it is time to create the Metrics within it. In the process of defining the Metrics, the following steps must be performed:

• Setting the Metric name.
• Applying Metric details (Service, Domain, Unit, Timeslot, Timezone, and so on).
• Setting Dashboard thresholds (refer to Configuring Dashboard Pages).
• Attaching related Metrics (if applicable) and the relationship between them.
• Defining the granularity at which the metric is calculated by the engine.
• Setting the objective statement and parameters.

At this stage, the Metric definition still lacks the following items:

• Business Logic formula/module and registration
• Clustering definition

These items are included in the Contract's Metrics only after the system infrastructure has been built and the Business Logic formulas have been developed and tested.

Note: An alternative method to the above approach s to first develop the service level templates within the system, rather than defining the contracts straight away. This enables creating the template which can then be used to create further contracts. In some cases, pre-existing service level templates can be imported into the system from another CA instance. This may allow a head start compared with creating the contracts from scratch. For more details on creating your own service level templates, refer to Creating Service Level Templates.

In some cases, it is advisable to create a sample contract initially, to test that everything is working correctly and as expected. It is then possible to create the Level Template(s) from this contract and store it in the service catalog, providing a solid starting point for all of the contracts in the system.