Glossary

SLA

Also called: Service Level Agreement · service level · service levels

A committed and measured level of service, meaningful only when the commitment is calculated against real operations and can be explained.

An SLA — Service Level Agreement — states what level of service is committed: response times, resolution times, availability, and what happens when they are missed. An OLA states the same between internal teams supporting that commitment.

What separates a useful SLA from a decorative one is whether the calculation can be explained. Business calendars, pauses, escalations and priority changes all affect a deadline, and "why does this case have this date?" is among the questions that consume a service team most, because answering it usually means asking an engineer to query the database. When the calculation is persisted with the case and the explanation is available from the record itself, the analyst, the supervisor and the auditor all see the same thing.

Related terms

Backlog

The volume of cases awaiting attention at a given moment. It is a flow indicator that anticipates deadline breaches before they occur and signals mismatches between demand and capacity.

CMDB

The repository of configuration items and the relationships between them, which is what turns an incident into a question you can answer.

Criticality

The degree to which the interruption of a service, capability or process affects the organization's operations or compliance.

Escalation

A design mechanism that raises a case to a higher level of decision or attention when a condition is met, typically the risk of breaching a deadline or threshold.

ITSM

The practice of managing IT as a set of services with owners, commitments and evidence, rather than as a collection of technology.

KPI

A measure that quantifies a declared attribute of something in the architecture, and therefore verifies whether an objective was met.

Predictive analytics

The use of trained models to anticipate an outcome before it occurs, such as a service level breach.