Measuring and reporting SLAs

[HealthServiceApps]

I've recently been working with a supplier to agree an SLA and they have an interesting approach that I would appreciate your view on.

they have 5 priorties
P1 - high
P2 - medium
P3 - low
P4 - bug
P5 - change

to measure availability they have said that they will take the time any P1 is active from the total available time.

if they havea p1 that is not linked to availability they will record it with a separate category and exclude it.

any system events such as disk space etc are raised as a P1 or 2 depending on the nature.

So they dont have distinct incidents, events and availability.

What are your thoughts on this approach?

[KenLuo]

Using incident ticket to monitor the availability seems not to be a good choice, as incidents are telling u there's an issue now, but the system might be still online and functioning.

So that's why people pushed back a lot.

Also the availability is more from a business perspective, so you might need to setup special tools / applications to automatically evaluate it.
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Luo, Tian-Hong (Ken)
Regional Operation Lead

ITIL Expert Certified

[Nethra]

As ITIL Priority/severity is used to prioritize the ticket.

Bug and Change is a category probably which is not to be part of the incident.

But yes couple of organization measure availability based on high impact incidents which is referred as Major Incidents (MI), which provides data about Time taken to recover and time taken to restore the services. These incidents are used to called the outage time.

In organization where we have good monitoring system in place the availability is called from there.

Hope this was helpful

regards,
Nethra

[Nethra]

Small Change in sentence:

These incidents are used to calculate the outage time.

[Diarmid]

As Ken said availability has got little relationship to incidents and nothing to do with their priority.
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"Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope."
William Penn 1644-1718