SLA is an abbreviation for "Service Level Agreement". It means to have guaranteed reaction or resolving times for incidents (= trouble tickets).
For instance you could have defined the following SLA levels For example:
Gold: Reaction time = 30 minutes, resolving time = 4 hours
Silver: Reaction time = 4 hours, resolving time = 24
hours
SLAs normally are part of a contract between a customer and a service provider.
Or in details description:
SLA are Service Level Agreements to resolve the tickets
by the market. SLA means Service Level agreement. It is the service agreement
between a Company and a service provider. For
example an IT Organization providing support of SAP / other software /
hardware has a agreement. This can be for example categorized based on
criticality of the incident. High priority incident has to be resolved
on 10 hours. Medium priority incident has a 3 days time to resolve etc.
Another good example is when you encounter problems with the SAP ERP modules
e.g. If you are creating an OSS message reporting to SAP that you found a product bug, this would be one ticket.
In regard to time frames this usually differs from SLA to SLA, e.g. if you raise a VERY HIGH OSS message, SAP is supposed to react (start working) on that OSS within one hour.
Usually the higher the priority the smaller the reaction time and also maximum processing time to resolve the problem is.
You would solve a ticket by analyzing
the problem e.g. through debugging the example and once you identified
the problem making the appropriate coding changes to correct the issue.
Define service level agreement
SLA's are nothing but Service level agreements.
These are defined in project preparation phase and client would have made an agreement with the company for the level of service. The SLA's are applicable in Production as well as maintenance support projects. For example: if your company follows a ticketing process (a ticket is nothing but an environment contains complete description of the problem which contains Short description, problem, customer contact details, screen shots of the error etc.,) and for each ticket there will be a severity for example business critical issues or problems may be treated as high or top severitie's. In those case your company or your team has to deliver the solution to the customer in agreed time limit or otherwise you might end up missing SLA's.
SLA's has two important time specifications
1. IPRT --- initial problem response time --- this is
nothing but time taken to respond to the problem.
2. PRT --- Problem response time ----- this is nothing
but time taken to solve the issue or problem.
Both IPRT and PRT will be different for different severitie's.
