4.6 Viewing SLAs and Understanding the SLA Hierarchy

SLAs display in the Operations Center console both in the hierarchy under Service Level Agreements and as a property of the elements to which they are applied.

Although agreements and objectives are set at the element level, the Service Level Agreements root element displays defined agreements and objectives. The Service Level Agreements hierarchy shows all service agreements, all objective definitions, all overrides, and all elements under the agreement’s umbrella.

For each agreement, there are three branches that provide different ways of monitoring the status of the SLA. They include:

Objectives: Each objective defined in the agreement regardless of where in the hierarchy it is defined.
Affected Elements: The complete element structure for all elements contained within the agreements umbrella. As you drill-down through the hierarchy, each element has an Objectives folder showing all objectives that apply to it.
Overrides: Any change (or override) made on any objective on any point of the hierarchy. This change affects elements in the SLA hierarchy from that point down.

Each element shown in the Affected Elements branch of the Service Level Agreements root element has a unique naming convention of: AgreementName on elementName.

This naming syntax clearly shows which instance of the element is being viewed. This is useful in a Business Service View where an element from the Service Level Agreements tree was dragged and dropped into a view. The naming syntax indicates the status and information is related to the agreement and not to the element itself.

Figure 4-3 Hierarchy in Explorer Pane in Operations Center console

In Figure 4-3, GOLD is the only Service Level Agreement that was set up on the Financial element. It has three objectives at this time—one for availability, one for incidents, and one for outages.

Under the Financial element, there are three children included in the agreement (Investment > Resources, NoVa Bank, and One Financial), as well as their children, which are technology elements from adapters. There is one override on the agreement, set on the NoVa Bank element.

Table 4-1 lists useful options that are available on the Service Level Agreements elements’ right-click menu.

Table 4-1 Element Right-Click Options

Option	Available on…	Description
Go To Element	Agreements, objective, overrides, and affected elements	Shifts Explorer pane focus to the element where the agreement, objective, or override was set.
Show Details	Agreements, objectives, and overrides	Opens agreement, objective or override properties.
Show Root Cause	Affected elements	Opens Root Cause information.