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? 

[Niclas]

Thank you both for the input. After all I'm really confused right now. There are so many concepts regarding relating SLAs to Service Offerings / Contracts

1. The SLA Agreement tables mentioned by Jira which are referred via the Service Offering, but are undocumented.
2. Te Service Contract SLA tables mentioned by Stig, but as stated by Jiri despite their names they are not related to Service and Service Offerings but to Asset Management
3. Relating SLA Service Commitments to Service Offerings, but this documentation from Madrid has been removed from the documentation in New York and Orlando release.
4. Configure Contract SLA for Vendor Ticketing, but starting with New York this documentation is outdated as the plugin has been replaced with the new "Vendor Manager Workspace" plugin,
5. Vendor Manager Workspace has a "SLA Tracking" report that relates SLAs to Vendors and Service Offerings, but the new documentation does not contain details how to setup SLAs. I think it's also done via SLA Service Commitment mentioned in 3)

There seems to be so many concepts, who are somehow similar, and the documentation for all of them is kinda mystery.

[Jiri Skala]

Hi Niclas,

I can even enhance your list: the table structure and handling of Service Offerings and Commitments were changed starting from New York, see the documentation:

• Service Portfolio Management (Madrid)
• Service Portfolio Management (New York)

However, there is no reason to be sad. ServiceNow is evolving and improving. I started working with SN on the Calgary version and if I were to compare Calgary and Orlando, I would have to say that they are two completely different platforms 🙂

But back to your concern. Let's look at the problem via ITIL perspective:

1. A service provider offers its services to customers. It can represent two different situations: 
2. • The service provider and its customers are within the same company.
   • • Typically, a service provider is an IT department offering IT services to the rest of the company.
     • However, also other company's departments can act as service providers and offer their services to the rest of the company, e.g. the HR department can offer its services in the area of handling employee affairs.
   • The service provider offers its services on a commercial basis, i.e., the customers are different legal entities than their service providers.
3. No service provider is fully self-sufficient and therefore in both the above situations, they need to purchase some supporting services either from vendors (a vendor is always a different legal entity than the service provider). All this leads to a complex supply chain and the ServiceNow platform enables us to document, manage, control, evaluate, and report all aspects related to this chain.

If you tell me what type of service provider you are, i.e., who you provide your services to, and which SN version are you using, I can describe, which SN entities (tables) you should use and for which purpose. It is not so difficult as it can seem.