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Understanding Service Modeling › Service Modeling Terminology and Concepts › Service-Level Agreements

Service-Level Agreements

A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract that specifies the service expectations of internal or external customers. An example is the downtime that is acceptable for various resources.

An SLA can, for example, help ensure that an online shopping site is available and delivering the level of service that internet shoppers expect. If performance is poor, some transactions can be lost, thus reducing profits and discouraging repeat customers.

You can define SLAs when you define or edit service models using the SLA tab. CA SOI uses the measurable provisions that you specify in the SLA to monitor the real-time health of each associated service, and records outage time when the service is down. The recorded time is compared to the SLA thresholds to determine the status of the SLA for a given time period.

SLAs let you track service metrics over a specified interval based on specific thresholds. They can help ensure adherence to any quality or availability requirements that an organization must maintain.

SLAs in CA SOI are based on the following attributes:

Each SLA is based on one of the core CA SOI metrics. An SLA calculates violations that are based on a threshold, spans a defined time period, and is optionally only monitored during defined business hours.

CA SOI uses the measurable provisions that you specify in the SLA to monitor the real-time health of each associated service, and records outage time when the service is down. The recorded time is compared to the SLA thresholds to determine the status of the SLA for a given time period.

For example, you can define an SLA that tracks the quality of a customer-facing website. If the quality drops below the threshold level, an outage is recorded. If the quality stays below the threshold level past the defined threshold time, a violation is recorded. You can track the SLA status through the Operations Console, Dashboard, and reports to ensure that the website meets the customer quality expectation level.

For service-level agreement procedures, see the Service Modeling Best Practices Guide.