Almost in any action movie, there’s bound to be a moment where the main character, let it be John McClane, defuses a ticking time bomb. If he doesn’t do it in time, dreadful consequences will follow. Just like that, IT service managers solve incidents and problems in ServiceNow while being pressed for time set by Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
To see how IT employees are coping with their duties, one may need to analyze how good or bad IT staff is ‘defusing’ incidents with ticking SLAs. For these purposes, ServiceNow provides a fairly good tool – ServiceNow reporting. This article outlines its numerous overall capabilities, and here we will focus on ServiceNow SLA reporting precisely.
ServiceNow SLA reporting basics
The first thing that pops into mind when trying to grasp how things are with SLAs, is probably the total number of breached SLAs for a particular period of time. Such a report is easy to make. In fact, it is included in the list of built-in reports in ServiceNow. However, the mere number probably won’t show you everything you need. What will? A report on the share of breached SLAs. It will visualize not only how many SLAs were breached but also how this number looks compared to the total number of incidents.
Though, bear in mind that the choice between these two depends on each particular situation. Sometimes, the number can be more ‘eloquent’ than the share. For example, when the share of breaches is always very low, it’s better to work with the number.
Besides, to see the bigger picture behind a couple of numbers, it would be nice if we could check how the situation with breached SLAs changes with time. And ServiceNow does enable us to make such reports. We can display SLA trends within different time frames and additionally group the data by any field in the form. For instance, you can see the overall number of SLAs archived last year and group them by type.
Diving into more detail
It’s difficult to make proper informed decisions just after looking at basic SLA statistics. To perform in-depth analysis of your IT support activities, you need more than that.
Who breaches SLAs
First of all, you can see which team members breach SLAs more often and compare their performance to one another. For instance:
It looks like David Loo has the most breaches in the December of 2017. But it doesn’t mean that he is the weakest player in the team. Such data needs to be juxtaposed with the actual number of incidents that the employee had to resolve, hence, you need the share of breached SLAs. It’s only logical that the more work you have, the more breaches you can face. Or he could be assigned to dealing with already ‘expired’ incidents. Anyway, to say more about IT employees’ performance, you need more information.
By the way, these kinds of reports are available in ServiceNow out-of-the-box (OOTB). Just like the number, share or dynamics of breaches.
Why they breach SLAs
Now you need to see why the SLA was breached. And unfortunately this is not something OOTB ServiceNow has in stock. However, it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. ServiceNow specialists can configure your system and add an SLA breach cause field to the Incident form. This way, employees will have to state what caused the breach, which will enable you to see the tendencies and act on them.
The report may look something like this:
Types of breached SLAs
To perform proper SLA activities analysis, you may also need to make a report on the types of SLAs that are breached more often. It may be rather simple to do, if you want to see OOTB types of SLAs. Such a report would reflect how quickly IT staff resolves incidents of different priority. Here it is:
However, if you want to see a report on the types of SLAs specific to your company, you’ll need to have ServiceNow SLA reporting tailored, just like the rest of the platform. With ServiceNow consultants’ help, here’s approximately what you’ll be able to get:
Puzzling? No worries. Here’s what this report means and helps you with. Let’s say you are an online shopping company. You’ll probably have types of SLAs connected with:
- Your web store
- Your payment system
- Your employees’ IT needs, etc.
Some of these will be more important, and it will be crucial to solve problems with their management right away. The first thing to do here is to run a report on the overall types of SLAs breached more often (as above). You’ll see what the situation is like with your most important SLAs (your web store) compared to other types. Then you can run a report on the reasons why the most important SLAs get breached (similar to what we did in point 2). And then you can start immediate action to prevent possible service outages.
“Who’s to blame” in large organizations
Large enterprises usually employ big teams of IT specialists. And the more people you have in the IT team, the more complicated it can get to analyze “who’s to blame” for SLA breaches. Especially if the IT structure is multi-tier, with different IT support groups tossing incidents around.
IT service managers can tackle this problem by creating reports on SLA in ServiceNow and making them reflect the state of things objectively. But first things first. Before starting the whole ‘whodunit’ turmoil, you need to configure your SLA definitions. And here’s a dilemma:
- If you want to give each group that gets a first priority incident an hour to resolve it (if it doesn’t go between tiers), you can do it. But this way, groups can toss the incident endlessly without resolving it. Countless hours may be wasted without technically breaching SLAs.
- Instead, you can tick the Retroactive start box, and one hour (or else) will be set for the whole resolution process. But this option allows assignment groups to arrange ‘set ups.’ If they see that the time is running up, they can toss the incident to another group and save their own bacon. Making SLA reports with such data won’t be useful. Those groups who tossed the incident right before the SLA was breached will look better than those who fell victim to such ‘set ups.’
If you want to solve the dilemma, external efforts could really help. Realizing “who’s to blame” in such situations depends on a company’s particular inner processes. And ServiceNow consulting does help ServiceNow and your requirements meet. In this case, experts can customize your SLA definitions or create a suitable metric to get the data for reports.
Coda
Boasting is poor, but ServiceNow SLA reporting does have a reason for it. You can monitor your IT staff’s performance by making reports on:
- How many breaches there are.
- How the number of breaches looks compared to the total number of incidents.
- Who breaches SLAs more often.
- Why SLAs get breached.
- What problematic areas with SLAs there are, etc.
However, you may struggle with some of these, since not all the needed things are waiting for you in the ‘box.’
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