Why use stop time rather than resolved?

mgromacki · ‎08-17-2018

I have two Indicator Sources that I am using that I believe to be OOTB, they are as follows:

and

What exactly is stop time? And why would OLA use this metric, and not SLA?

Mark Stanger · ‎08-17-2018

I would use Stop time because 'Resolved' can be changed. If you have an incident that gets resolved, it could potentially be reopened by the caller. In that case, the 'Resolved' stamp would be overwritten the next time the Incident was resolved.

With SLA reporting, you really need to do everything on static data so that you can get accurate reporting and metrics. This is why most incident resolution SLAs have pause conditions to subtract out the time between 'Resolved' and 'Closed'. 'Closed' is the only point where you could have everything complete and calculate an accurate SLA. This is also when 'Stop time' would be stamped on your SLA.

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mgromacki · ‎08-17-2018

In terms of best practice for reporting on SLA and OLA, would it be more effective to track stop time as opposed to resolved time?

Brian Lancaster · ‎08-17-2018

I would say stop time as if you look at the task_sla table which is where all SLAs are stored there is not resolved time.

Phil Hunt · ‎01-03-2021

Why does ServiceNow have two differing indicator sources then?

I understand that SLA and OLA are merely for reporting purposes but they really need to clean up their documentation and tools IMHO.

This is straight out of the box:

Indicator Source for Incidents.SLA.Resolved

Indicator Source for Incidents.OLA.Resolved:

It's very confusing to practitioners of SN when we assume they must have had some meaning to make them different.