Creating and Working with Service-Level Agreements › How to Create and Work with Service-Level Agreements › SLA Example

SLA Example

Consider a retail website that must be available at all times for customers to place orders. The business enforces concrete performance and availability requirements on the website. Not only must the website be available for a certain amount of time, it must perform above a certain threshold so that customers are not frustrated by a slow response time.

The administrator must ensure that the website response time does not dip below a defined threshold for more than 8 hours in a month.

Assume the following for this example:

• The administrator modeled a service for the website that includes the components that enable the website to perform as expected. The service includes the web servers, order processing applications, product databases, network hosts and routers, and so on. The service also accurately represents the relationships among the CIs and the significance of each component.
• The benchmark to which the website must adhere is response time. The domain manager that manages the service CIs can calculate the response time and translate the metric to a severity that you can associate with service quality in CA SOI.

To create an SLA that monitors the website response time against defined benchmarks, the administrator enters the SLA properties for the website service similar to the following:

• Base the threshold on Quality in the SLA tab that must equal or exceed a moderately degraded status for 28800 Seconds of the SLA time period.

  This threshold assumes that a moderately degraded service quality indicates that the website response time has crossed the response time threshold. It also assumes that any status more severe than moderately degraded also indicates a response time threshold breach.

• Create an SLA period that recurs monthly and starts on the first day of every month.
• Select 24x7 for Business Hours, because the web site must be available for customer use at all times.

After the SLA period begins, the administrator can monitor SLA status to ensure adherence to the response time benchmark. For example, you could schedule a Service SLA Summary report to run every day at a specific time to summarize the downtime, outages, and SLA status for that day.