Businesses set up agreements with customers to provide a specific standard of service. The service provider and the customer together define an acceptable level of service by establishing key objectives. Each objective must be measurable so that both sides can determine if it is complies with the agreement. There is usually a defined time interval associated with measuring the success of each objective.
Typically the types of measurable data are:
Incidents: Events that occur when the service reaches or exceeds a specified condition.
Outages: Incidents that result in key services, such as data or call centers, becoming unavailable (going offline).
Downtime: The total elapsed time of an incident.
Availability: The amount of time that a service is operational. Also defined as the amount of time that an element has not reached a specified condition. Availability is expressed as a percentage of total time.
Objectives are written based on this data as follows:
Incidents: The service can have a specific number of incidents during a defined time period.
Outages: The service can have a specific number of outages during a defined time period.
Downtime: The service can be down or unavailable for a specific amount of time during a defined time period.
Availability: The service must be up or available for a specific amount of time during a defined time period.
Calculation: The service must meet a custom objective that is defined by either:
A mathematical calculation performed on element properties
A key metric formed from querying data in an external data source
The objectives are combined into one agreement called a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The agreement can specify the number of objectives that must be met during a specified time period. Health measurements determine whether the objectives are met.
Health and other measurements require the collection of data. The data collected depends on the type of service. For services involving technology, data can be collected about the status of the physical machines as well as the network connection.
Operations Center represents data as objects or elements. Each element has properties associated with it, and each element has a condition. This condition is based on either its own properties or other elements based on the relationships between elements. Use elements and the relationships between them to build service models that logically represent the critical services in an organization.
Objectives for SLAs are defined on elements. The relationship among elements is a factor for calculating the data for objectives. For example, an objective can apply to only one element, or that element and other elements associated with it.