SLAs and Reporting

[Bradford Shelle]

Hello Community,

Was wondering if those who are familiar with SLA's and reporting on them could help me out.

Our NOC uses SLA's to see how long it takes between when an Incident comes in, and when it gets assigned to one of our guys. The amount of time given before the SLA is breached changes given the priority of the Incident. Simple enough. What I found out recently was that about half of the Incidents that come in each week already have a specific user assigned to it right from the start. We're completely fine with that, but it screws with reporting since no SLA is triggered under these conditions.

The end goal here is to get a report which looks at all of the Incidents opened in the last week, and breaks the Incidents down by category, and then gives a percentage of Incidents with the SLA breached.

At the moment, I can think of one of two ways to get what I want (though I don't know how to do either)

1. Create a report that is somehow able to calculate the percentage of breached SLA's against the total number of Incidents per category per week based on a count of the breached SLA's.

2. Supplement the current SLA's with a new one that will always have the SLA as achieved when an Incident comes in that already is assigned to a user.

Open to any additional ideas as well.

Preemptive thanks to anyone who takes the time to give this a read and help out!

[gyedwab]

Hi Bradford,

Regarding the first point, it's going to be fairly difficult to do in ServiceNow. Explore Analytics is a natively integrated SaaS business intelligence tool that could do this, it just depends on what you're looking for.

For example, the easiest way to represent it (to get all the data points in one view) would be a multi-level pivot:

Incident SLA State Pivot

If you wanted it in more of a chart perspective you might need to put a few views together; for example, this is a trend of Incidents by Stage by Week:

Incident SLA State Timeline

If these kind of charts are interesting to you, you can sign up for a free trial at Explore Analytics, all of these reports can be published to ServiceNow dashboards.

Regarding the second point, I don't know if SLA is necessarily the right way to tackle it... achieving it makes sense (when STATE is NEW and ASSIGNED TO is not null), but if it isn't achieved... when does it stop measuring? You could do that, and ignore the "duration" aspect of it, and make sure to exclude it from any durational reporting.

You could also have a flag triggered by the above, which would give you a true/false to report on.

Also, there's a hidden field called "Reassignment Count" that could also give you an indication of what you're after. From a process perspective, it's important to know whether or not someone was initially assigned, but it's also important to know whether that first assigned person is correct or not.

[Bradford Shelle]

Thank you for the quick response Guy,

That looks like quite a powerful reporting tool that gets rid of some of the limitations in SN's reporting. Given how we're only just starting to get our feet wet with reports, I don't think we can justify the cost. Thank you for the suggestion though and I'll keep that tool in mind for the future.

Yeah it is rather counter intuitive to ask something that's designed to measure the difference in time between two activities to trigger when there's no time gap. Having it start when STATE is new and ASSIGNED TO is not null, making the duration an absurd number, then ending it when the incident closes since that is an event that will (almost) always happen would give the me achieved SLA stage I'm looking for. The downside is that the numbers will always be a little off since the SLA stage would be In Progress until the incident closes. I thought about trying to trick the end condition with a related field that always updates after an incident is created, but I'm drawing a blank on that.

Setting up a flag based on different SLAs is an interesting solution. Might have to play around with that a little and see what it looks like.

Thank you again for all of your suggestions.

[robpickering]

Bradford, you probably actually want a Metric.

http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Metric_Definition_Support

Once you have the data gathered via Metrics, you can report on it, or use the (for fee) Performance Analytics built into ServiceNow (or presumably the Explore Analytics mentioned by Guy).

This gets you out of the SLA area, where you need to really define a "Start", "Stop", and optionally a "Pause" condition.   Metrics allow you to measure differences.   So in the case where there's already an Assigned to, they actually get recorded with 0 time (I think).

[Bradford Shelle · Accepted solution]

Thank you for the suggestion Rob.

I poked around in Metrics a little bit. Looks like there's an out of box metric for the Assigned To field in Incidents, but looking through what kind of data it was coming up with didn't jive with what I was looking for.

I did, however, end up finding a different solution.

I created a new Database View that was very similar to the Incident SLA Database View that is stock in SN. I made it a left join so that I could see all records, regardless if they had a SLA attached to them or not. From there I just created a new report using the Database View, narrowed down the search results to just Incidents, and finally stacked the fields based on SLA stage. Sure enough, all of the incidents show up regardless if they have an SLA or not.

Thank you everyone for taking the time to stop by and help out!