How does SLA Definitions and Service Commitments all fit together?

[SB87]

Is someone able to confirm my understanding please? If I haven't got this right, then could you provide a business relatable example that's easy to understand please?

A service commitment is a promise between a provider and a customer. For example, we promise to resolve 95% of Incidents within 24 hours.

SLA Definitions are the blueprint of SLAs. If configured to run against the Incident table and if the Priority meets the criteria of a SLA Definition record, then a Task SLA will be created when a record is created and meets the conditions. I have noticed there is a "Service Commitment" checkbox, so I assume that when ticked, the Task SLA created against the definition will be measured as part of the Service Commitment calculation.

Service Commitment results can be viewed in the 'SLA Result' [service_sla_result] table. If a company has a Commitment configured, say with a target of 95% for Incident Resolution, then this table summarises the SLA results in a given period day/week/month. We can tell if a Service Commitment target was achieved during the period based on the 'breach' flag.

Can someone explain how Service Offerings fit into all this? How does a Service Offering relate to Service Commitments and SLAs? I presume a Service Offering is a more granular promise e.g. to fix all laptops within 2 days or to replace a faulty water dispenser within 12 hours? If that's correct, then how does it all come together?

Thanks in advance. 

SB

[Dan O Connor]

A Service Offering is a service you provide customers/end users. Examples of Service Offerings would be

- Video conferencing. 

- Web Conferencing.

- Email.

Behind these Service Offerings are Technical and Application services, that have owners, support groups, potentially third party partners and then associated SLA's etc. 

So think of the Service Offering as the offering you are providing the person. 

You are not providing them an Active Directory server or Azure instance. These are the technical components behind a Service Offering, like Email. 

A Service Offering isn't like an SLA or a commitment. It's just the service you are providing. 

So if you are thinking how these all tie together. 

You provide a Service offering to a customer or business unit.

That Service offering has technical services or application services behind it.

These services may have SLA's with internal support groups or external support partners. 

[SB87]

Thanks for your reply, @Dan O Connor.

I suppose what is causing confusion is how the 'SLA Result' [service_sla_result] table references both the  [service_offering] and [service_commitment] tables.

So, if I have understood this correctly, it might looks something like this:

Service Commitment configured

- Type: SLA

- Based on SLA Definition: Time to Resolve P1 4 Hours (Incident)

- SLA %: 95

Now if 100 Incidents were created in a day, and they all meet the criteria for the "Time to Resolve P1 (Incident)" SLA Definition, and 90 of them were resolved in 4 hours, but 10 didn't, then the Service Commitment wouldn't have been met, failing by 5% of the 95% target.

A Service Offering doesn't really directly impact the above, but what forms the association is that the service will have SLAs attached to the underlying components that support the service? e.g. a service might be to provide an intranet service, but the underlying components might be a web server. That webserver upkeep will have an underlying SLA if it was to go offline.

Apologies if this still isn't right. I'm kinda new to this.