What is the purpose of the SLA field and referenced Agreement table on Service Offering?

[Niclas]

On the Service Offering, there is a field "SLA". The field is not referencing the "SLA Definitions" table, but instead the "Agreement" Table.

I tried to research the docs against those Agreement table, which I have never heard of before. I cannot find anything. What is the purpose of the SLA field and the Agreement Table? How does it relate to SLA Definitions? 

[Joaquin Campos]

Hi Niclas,

You can find some additional information under point 6 of this link. Basically its purpose is to define a requirement of the offered service. You can link each Service Offering to an SLA record: 

Hope it helps!

Joaquín

[Jiri Skala]

What a coincidence! Only two weeks ago I noticed the table Agreement [sla] when I was preparing a demo about the Service Portfolio Management plugin. I investigated this mysterious table a little bit; let me share my findings:

• this table has 9 HTML fields to capture formatted text: Description, Change procedures, Disaster recovery, Incident procedures, Notes, Responsibilities, Security notes, Service goals, Signatures
• there also exist table OLA [ola] which is extended from the table Agreement [sla]
• for these two tables, there exist many referencing tables (i.e. they are visible as related lists on the form). The most remarkable are the tables, which are referenced only from Agreement [sla] and OLA [ola] tables, therefore, their only likely purpose is to serve as child records for Agreement and OLA records:
• • SLA/OLA General CI relationships [itil_agreement_ci]
  • SLA/OLA Business Owners [itil_agreement_owners]
  • SLA/OLA Business Owners [itil_agreement_support] - I have no idea why two different tables have the same label
  • SLA/OLA Targeted Items [itil_agreement_target_ci]
  • SLA/OLA Reports [itil_agreement_reports]
  • Agreement Requests [sla_request]
• All these tables above are included in the package Service Management Basics [com.snc.service], which means that they are by default present in every instance.
• As regards other referencing tables, especially noteworthy are these two: Business service [cmdb_ci_service] and Service offering [service_offering].

Based on these facts, my personal feeling is that the purpose of such a table structure is to capture information about Service Level Agreements in terms of ITIL definition: SLA is a documented agreement between a service provider and a customer that identifies both services required and the expected level of service (Source: ITIL Foundation Manual, ITIL 4 Edition).

It is a pity that these tables are undocumented, resulting in that almost nobody knows about them.

[Stig Brandt]

It is documented here and is very useful, when using contracts 

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/orlando-it-service-management/page/product/service-level-manageme...

In my experience though, not many are using contracts.

//Stig

[Jiri Skala]

Hi Stig, the article you are referencing relates to Service Contract [ast_service] table, while I was writing about the Agreement [sla] table.

Nevertheless, I'm grateful you pointed out this table because there seems to be some business/process connection between these two entities:

• The documentation says that the table Service Contract [ast_service] stores information about service contracts for asset management purposes. It groups together SLA definitions (not Agreements) that relate to a single vendor or customer, as well as the CIs, locations, groups, users, and child contracts that are related to the contract.
• The table Agreement [sla] is (probably) intended to capture the content of the SLA document in terms of ITIL terminology. It is worth noting that:
• • it also enables grouping together CIs related to the Agreement, see related lists SLA/OLA General CI relationships and SLA/OLA Targeted Items. However, it doesn't enable grouping other entities as Service Contract [ast_service] table does.
  • it has a very different set of attributes (columns), which means it captures distinct information than the Service Contract [ast_service] table.

One possible explanation can be found, again, in ITIL. ITIL distinguishes between contracts and agreements: a contract is a legally binding document, while an agreement is either a document signed by two parties within one legal entity or it is a contract's attachment. In this context, the SLA document can be:

• either an internal agreement in a company, which is signed by a service provider, typically a representative of the IT department, and a customer, i.e., a representative of another company's department.
• or an attachment of the contract between a company and its external vendor providing the services to this company. This attachment has the title "Service Level Agreement" and contains technical and procedural details about provided services. BTW, the HTML columns in the table Agreement [sla] are exactly those which I'd expect there to capture this kind of information (see my previous post).

Maybe these two ServiceNow's entities follow these principles.