How are SLAs typically designed and managed in ServiceNow?

[Shaah]

I am trying to understand how Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are generally implemented and managed in ServiceNow.

I am specifically looking for clarity on areas such as:

• How SLA definitions differ from task SLAs

• How start, pause, resume, and stop conditions work

• Business time vs elapsed time

• Use of schedules and holidays

• Escalations and notifications

• Reporting and common operational challenges

From an implementation and operational perspective, how do teams usually design SLAs so they remain accurate, maintainable, and scalable?

Any guidance or shared experience would be appreciated.

[Hemanth M1]

Hi @Shaah ,

Let me simply for you!

• How SLA definitions differ from task SLAs

• SLA definitions: These are the configuration setups to trigger an SLA, such as: What should be my SLA name, table, is it a Response SLA or Resolution SLA, what must be the duration, schedule and when to start, stop, pause, cancel and complete.

• Task SLAs (task_sla) table: These are the actual SLA records triggered based on the conditions you defined in the SLA definition.

  Ex: SLA Definition:

  • Name: Incident P1
  • Table: Incident
  • Target: Response
  • Duration: 1 hour
  • Schedule: 24x5
  • Start: When a P1 incident gets created
  • Stop: When incident state goes to Resolved
  • Pause: When incident state goes to Hold
  • Resume: When incident state changes from Hold
  • Cancel: When incident priority changes or incident gets canceled

  How start, pause, resume, and stop conditions work

  The explanation above answers this question.

  Business time vs. elapsed time

  Let’s say incident duration is 3 days and the schedule is 24x5 (excluding holidays).

  • Incident opened on Friday and closed on Monday.
  • Business elapsed time is 2 days (Friday and Monday, because it is per schedule).
  • Actual elapsed time is 4 days (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday - the total number of days since the SLA was triggered and run).

  Use of schedules and holidays

  Schedules are imperative - ex: if you want to run SLAs only during weekdays, you would set the schedule as 24x5 (weekdays).

  Holidays: If you’d like to pause SLAs during holidays, you can add a list of holidays under your schedule as a child schedule.

  For example, if an incident is created on 31st Dec and has 2 day SLA, it will breach on 2nd Jan, not on 1st Jan (it would pause on 1st Jan ). You can use dynamic selection for holidays, like the first day of the year, last day of the week, etc...

  Escalations and notifications

  ServiceNow uses SLA engines to track SLA durations. You can clone and set them up as per your needs.

ex: 

• Reporting and common operational challenges

  You typically report on "task_sla"—this is where the actual SLA record stores all the information based on the SLA definition (as explained in point number 1).

  You can report on SLA breached records, about-to-breach records (like 50%, 75% breach etc..), which team is responding to tickets on time and which team is not...

  Operational challenges: You have to set up the SLA definitions and reminders appropriately so that teams can take action.

Hope this helps!, if so

[Hemanth M1 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Shaah, 

Lets us know if you have any additional questions if not please close the loop!

[AndersBGS]

Hi @Shaah ,

Many of your questions are actually answered if you go through the documentations. But in short, SLA definition is the definition responsible for creating SLAs and associate to the specified record. Start, pause etc. are set based on filter condition. Business time vs. elapsed time is your business hours vs. actual hours. schedules defines when business hours should run. Please let us know if you have any specific issues after reading this and the documentation in general. 

[Shaah]

Basically the answer given by you feels more like that [ i feel like ] =>> you have google and offcourse i can find a better answer rather accepting your answer as helpful 😅