On 06/14/2012 06:42 PM, David Boyes wrote:

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I am looking for documentation for "Services" and "Service Level Agrements". They are located under "Ticket Settings", as can be seen in http://doc.otrs.org/3.1/en/html/adminarea.html#adminarea-general

Services are things that your organization or infrastructure provides - both technical and non-technical.

Example: in my environment, a server running the 'bind' software provides a Service called "DNS Server". It's helpful to define these things because you can then use them to quickly evaluate the impact of the loss of a particular set of hardware or software on the whole environment, eg for the server I mentioned above, I know immediately that if I lose Server A, DNS resolution will be impacted and customers will experience poor performance. It also lets me indicate automatically to the service people that this is a critical issue -- if DNS is broken, EVERYTHING is affected, and they better drop everything and fix Server A.

We also use Service items to indicate that a piece of infrastructure is part of a non-technical business resource (eg, HR, Payroll, etc). It's very handy to see immediately that since Server A is down, I need to contact the following business contacts for HR and Payroll (and that I need to start the escalation on the business side because there might be a risk that paychecks won't get printed on time).

Service Level Agreements are sets of conditions on response times, etc to events. Customers will pay extra for guaranteed response time. SLAs control escalation of issues, response time guarantees, etc -- think of them as contracts with the customers that define a set of expectations and processes for handling their events.

Defining SLAs in OTRS communicates these commitments to your agents, so that they know that issues with a 1 hr SLA are more important than the ones with a 4 hr SLA, and should be worked on first. You also have reporting on the number of times you didn't meet the SLA commitment -- which indicates who needs training, and when you may need more resources available if you are consistently missing your SLA targets on a particular shift, etc.

Example: in my environment, customers can buy three levels of service (best effort (bronze), 4 hr response (silver), 1 hr response (gold)). I have 3 SLA items defined (Bronze, Silver, Gold). My default dashboard for agents puts Gold SLA customers at the top, then Silver, then Bronze. I get a report every morning on how many incidents occurred in each SLA, how many hit their targets for response time, and who was the responsible agent for the incidents that didn't meet the SLA.

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I have browsed the admin manual, but could not find any hint on what a "Service" or SLA is good for (I have an idea based on common usage of these words, but that did not quite work out in my install).

The ITSM manual is a bit spotty on this stuff (good as far as it goes, but it's more how to implement than why). I've been meaning to contribute updates, but haven't really had the time.

I see. Thank you for the explanation. Now what I still don't get: how does that relate to tickets and queues? I had assumed that I could somehow link a queue to a service and thus to a specified SLA. But that seems not to be the case. Also, we don't have the ITSM module installed (but can still define services and slas). So, why can we still define them, and what is it good for? Isaac