SLA Management and Monitoring V2

Several years ago I posted a link to my SLA management integration code on the Juice. This code integrated the SLA contracts in contract management with the Helpdesk, and enabled Helpdesk users to associate SLAs to incidents and to monitor and report on the performance of these in true business hours, all without too much effort.

I know numerous people have adopted this as I have had regular requests for advice and questions about use. These have prompted me to make significant updates recently to the code which meets just about all of the requests customers and prospects have asked for/about.

So there is now a version 2 of the Advanced SLA integration package available that:

• Enables SLA's defined in Contract Management to be selected within the Helpdesk and associated to calls in Helpdesk.
• Enables working days and holidays to be defined as 'resources' and provides functions that can be used in SQL queries that will use these to calculate times in true business hours.
• Provides out of the box reports and policies that use these capabilities to set and monitor SLA performance.

Specific to Rev 2 code is a new Helpdesk integration tab in the SLA which offers the ability to:

• Specify whether the SLA is going to be available to the Helpdesk or not.
• Whether the SLA is a third party or internal SLA. The software now enables you to monitor internal and Third Party (i.e. incidents subsequently assigned to a third party) SLA performance simultaneously.
• As many different response and resolution times for different combinations of incident type, priority, urgency and impact as required. In other words a single SLA can now provide different response/resolution times based on relevant fields within the incident.
• The ability to define which status is used to specify the call is closed as far as the SLA is concerned. For internal SLA's this is normally 'closed' but for Third Party SLA's it might be a 'Third Party closed' code.
• The ability to specify which status' will stop the SLA monitoring clock. In other words which are the 'hold' status codes.
• The ability to specify which working period and holiday schedule apply to the SLA. SLA's, Workers or Departments can have different Working Week/Holiday tables associated with them and used in the calculations.

Click to view.

Additionally the working period capabilities now include:

• The ability to specify time zones and daylight saving hours offsets to support multinational environments.
• The ability to specify a break period in the working day for those countries where a lunch break is typically accepted as part of the working day.

Click to view.

Out of the box reports and monitors now include:

• Dashboard type reports for status of currently open calls (i.e In SLA, Warning, Exceeded.)
• Reports on SLA performance for periods logged within a period (i.e. last months SLA performance Statistics.)
• Reports on Third Party SLA performance. i.e. Reports that can be used in meetings with the Third Party that present calls assigned to them and response and resolution rates recorded (which include reopening calls with the third party if appropriate.)
• Notification Policies for both fixed period SLA monitoring and rolling time SLA Monitoring (i.e. taking the 'on hold' times out.) The rolling time monitors have been optimized to work more effectively in typical Customer environments than previous versions.

Click to view.

Supported versions are Helpdesk SP4 and SP5, SQL 2000 and 2005, and any Asset Management version in the past 3 or so years. The software also supports upgrading from the original version without loss of any functionality.

If you'd like to know more about this please do drop me a line - and I'll send you the details...