What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

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ericchaves
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What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by ericchaves »

Hi Folks,

How exactly Services and SLA works in standard OTRS (not in OTRS:ITSM) ?
1- What is a service?
2- How do I associate a ticket to a service?
3- Does an SLA overrides the queues escalation parameter?
4- If I create more than one SLA an associate it with the same service, what happens?
5- How can I check SLA levels? is there a SLA report?

Cheers,

Eric.
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by crythias »

I've been playing around with that trying to figure it out.

Here's what I've determined from docs, and trial and error:
A service is a type of service offered. My trial was "email service". I made it up, but consider that it'd be *something* that you'd use a SLA Service Level Agreement for.

The way I think about it is for instance when you buy a Dell computer and you choose how you want the service of type "repair" and then you get a SLA of "4 hours" or "Next Business Day"

So, once you determine the type of service ... something ... that you'd provide, you create the categories of Service level agreement that apply to that Service. ("Gold", "Silver", "Platinum", "4 hours", "Next Business Day", 8/5, "24/7", "When I can get to it")...

Within SLA, you click-select the services that apply to that agreement, and a calendar. Escalation information is relevant to "When a ticket is placed, how soon are you expected to respond, address, and fix"

I don't know the answer to 3, but my guess is likely "Yes.", because ...

A ticket can be associated with a service that is assigned to a Customer User from Customer Users <-> Services. I can't figure out how that works with an inbound email ticket at the moment, but certainly when created by Phone Ticket or Email Ticket, the services that you provide a Customer User can be assigned as well a SLA at the time of creation.

4) Nothing. You can provide different agreed levels of service per service (eg, Gold, Silver, Bronze of service "email down/up fix").
5) I don't have an answer, but there are different screens that show you this, and then again, there are lots of reports available.

Disclaimer: I don't have enough knowledge to provide "Best Practice" answers to this topic. This is only what seemed to make sense to me as I was trying to figure it out. I welcome and encourage anyone who can set me straight on this topic.
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by iangp »

Hi,
This answer makes sense to me, however I'd like to expand a little.
You might want to create a Service Catalogue outlining all the services you provide.

A sample of my service catalogue:
WAN Support
LAN Support
Email/Exchange
Active Directory
Desktop Support
Patch Management
Anti Virus
IT Procurement
PABX

The above will most likely have sub categories such as Install/Move/Add/Change/Delete (ITIL stuff) and Incidents.

Consider the impact of an outage of each of the catalogue items as well as the importance of a change in each area, and then assign an SLA.
The SLA is a timeframe allowed to completed the request or resolve the incident which will probably dictated to you by the fine people negotiating contracts and such.

The SLA should then tie in with each service and reporting should be able to be pulled showing (amongst other things) tickets breached/escalated and productivity which will assist in managing staff and vendor performance as well as client expectation.

I am new to OTRS so the above explanation may not fit in exactly with OTRS can do, but I think basic ITIL principles will still rule.

Best Regards
Ian
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by Mothra »

ericchaves wrote: How exactly Services and SLA works in standard OTRS (not in OTRS:ITSM) ?


They provide a greater granularity for escalations times (response, update and solution). Without them, escalation times are simply a property of a queue, and I've seen several implementations of OTRS where people have added multiple queues in order to work on higher priority tickets! With services and SLAs, you can keep the number of queues low, but still offer a range of response times depending on the nature of the ticket.

In some companies, SLAs relate directly to particular types of support request, thus the service "Login Account" might have the SLAs "Password Reset Request", "Access Problem" and "New Account Request", each with their own target response, update, resolution and, if you really want it, their own business hours (i.e. calendar). So maybe access problems are dealt with 24x7, but new user accounts are only dealt with Monday to Friday between 9am and 5pm.

Key relationship to remember is: Customer <-> Service <-> SLA. This means that when a ticket comes in from a known customer, the OTRS Agent can only select the services and SLAs that are appropriate to them, rather than having to select from a long list. Also, if you use the UI, it allows the customer to select from lists that are tailored directly to them.
ericchaves wrote: 5- How can I check SLA levels? is there a SLA report?
If by "report" you mean "ticket stats", then yes you can list the number of tickets raised against one or more SLAs.
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by alfar »

Mothra wrote:Key relationship to remember is: Customer <-> Service <-> SLA.
I have been trying to understand service, sla, customer, company features to use it properly in my OTRS, but when i tried to write it all down before doing it in OTRS i got mixed up.

We have several services as a IT company:
1. ERP support - each module is a different service eg.: (Finances, Warehouse, CRM,... etc)
2. IT Ousourcing - divided to Software - Word, Excel, Thundebird, ..., hardware - Serwer, Printer, Laptop, Desktop, PDA ..., Network.... etc.

We offer couple SLA's such as - NBD, 4h response, 24h response, ..,
We also have contracts which are combination of Services and SLA for each Client Company:
1. Company1 - ContractA - ERP Support (Finances only), IT Outsourcing (Hardware Servers only) - SLA 4h Response, in this company we have 50 users, 5 of then uses ERP, all uses Servers (terminal, AD, Exchange etc...)
2. Company2 - ContractB - ERP Support (Finances, CRM )
3. Company 3 - ContractC - IT Outsourcing (software, hardware)

Now what i need is:
1. Escalation dependent on SLA with Contract
2. Reports about Contracts - time consumption (overall, per service), SLA realization, ...
3. Agents needs to see only tickets those which suits their knowledge (ERP, Hardware, Software)

I tried to do this like this:
1. Queue - ERP, Hardware, Software .. - added Agents to Queue using Groups
2. SLA - NBD, 4h response, 24h response
3. Services - ERP-Finances, CRM, Hardware - laptops, servers, Software-word,excel - THIS IS A PROBLEM
I can't set SLA to Service with Contract, only one way to do it is make new Services for each Contract:
Services:
1. ContractA
a) ERP Support - Finances
b) IT Outsourcing - Hardware - Servers
c)
2. ContractB
a) ERP Support - Finances
CRM
3. ETC

to each of them connect different SLA proper to the Contract.
Do You know a better way to make it in OTRS.

If I use only one service eg.: ERP - Finances there will be no way to assign different SLA's to those companies which uses ERP Finances. I hope i'm wrong ??

I would be very grateful if someone could help me with this.

Best regards
Alfar
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by crythias »

You can provide multiple SLAs per service.
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by alfar »

But there is no way to connect SLA with Company (customer) only through services, so how it would know that when COmpany 1 uses ERP Finances it should be SLA1, and when Company2 uses ERP Finances - SLA2
Services can be connected to users, but SLA cannot connect to users, so how OTRS will figure it out ??
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by Mothra »

alfar wrote:But there is no way to connect SLA with Company (customer) only through services, so how it would know that when COmpany 1 uses ERP Finances it should be SLA1, and when Company2 uses ERP Finances - SLA2
Services can be connected to users, but SLA cannot connect to users, so how OTRS will figure it out ??
I won't and it can't - you've hit upon a limitation of the data model. I've tried a few workarounds, but none of them were satisfactory.
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by alfar »

So the first idea was the only way ??
Each contract need to have their own services :(

Pleas add this to OTRS as a Feature Request, it's very needed.

Thank's for help
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by alfar »

Added to OTRS Bugzilla
http://bugs.otrs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6372

Waiting for answer :)
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by felix »

Mothra wrote: Key relationship to remember is: Customer <-> Service <-> SLA. This means that when a ticket comes in from a known customer, the OTRS Agent can only select the services and SLAs that are appropriate to them, rather than having to select from a long list. Also, if you use the UI, it allows the customer to select from lists that are tailored directly to them.
I have a question regarding this one.

Is there any other way to link SLA or Service to a type of ticket/queue or company?
Because now, i don't see a way....

Other question, is it possible to link a customer immediatly , while creating him, to a service? Because now you have to go to another screen and link him explicitly...

thx
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by Mothra »

felix wrote:
Mothra wrote: Key relationship to remember is: Customer <-> Service <-> SLA. This means that when a ticket comes in from a known customer, the OTRS Agent can only select the services and SLAs that are appropriate to them, rather than having to select from a long list. Also, if you use the UI, it allows the customer to select from lists that are tailored directly to them.
I have a question regarding this one.

Is there any other way to link SLA or Service to a type of ticket/queue or company?
Because now, i don't see a way....
Me neither and it's extremely frustrating to have to explain to our internal customers why they are able to raise a ticket with Service "Printer", SLA "Out of Toner" and then accidentally send it to the software development team!
felix wrote: Other question, is it possible to link a customer immediatly , while creating him, to a service? Because now you have to go to another screen and link him explicitly...

thx
No, it's a two stage process, and when you have lots of customers and lots of services, it becomes a complete nightmare to administer. Since Customers have to belong to a Company (via CustomerID), I don't see why the mapping can't be Company<->Services<->SLAs. This still wouldn't solve the Services<->Queues issue. However, it is free, so perhaps we should be grateful for what we do have ;-)
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by crythias »

A few things to note:
If you want to restrict an SLA to a service to a customer (1 to 1 to 1) it's probably best to incorporate a single service-sla pairing (create a customer specific service that has exactly one SLA).

If you want to restrict services for a queue, that's a bit of a problem, because of how the SLA is tied so far down the list:
[optional Customer Group containing specific list of] Queue which basically has no relation to the customer or customerID/company.
You can restrict the available queues through Customer Groups or through the global Queue list/Sysconfig, but the relationship database-wise is that the Queue is oblivious to the membership of the queue's associated group.

The permission system that's in place says that you can't use/choose/submit to the queue if you're not a member of the Queue's group, and that's about as far as it goes.

Mitigation: back to the RAW queue for submissions, where a human dispatcher forwards tickets to the correct Queue.
or
Automation (to a point): Generic Agent every 10 minutes: Match service="website" and ticket state=new and queue=Raw Set Queue="webadmins"
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by crythias »

This is an old post, but this ACL HowTo is relevant: viewtopic.php?f=60&t=11235
Your customers (employees?) might want to submit a request to Plumbing, but they have services attached like "Word", or "Monitor", or "Toilets". How do you make sure that the Plumbing people only get tickets for services related to Plumbing?
Make an ACL and place it in Config.pm:
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by diemx »

Hi,
alfar wrote:But there is no way to connect SLA with Company (customer) only through services, so how it would know that when COmpany 1 uses ERP Finances it should be SLA1, and when Company2 uses ERP Finances - SLA2
Services can be connected to users, but SLA cannot connect to users, so how OTRS will figure it out ??
You can categorize your service, for example:

ERP Finances (co.xx) = this service you can set SLA 1
ERP Finances (co.yy) = this service you can set SLA 2

co = Comopany
xx = initial name of the company

Thank you! :)
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by alandba »

On my installation, version 3.3.3, file /opt/otrs/Kernel/System/Ticket.pm there is a function TicketEscalationPreferences.
This functions is documented with:
get escalation preferences of a ticket (e. g. from SLA or from Queue based settings)

http://otrs.github.io/doc/api/otrs/3.3/ ... et.pm.html
And Resuming the code, it says that if 'Ticket::Service is set to yes and Ticket has a sla, the escalation is based on sla, else the escalation is based on queue:

Code: Select all

sub TicketEscalationPreferences {
    my ( $Self, %Param ) = @_;

    # check needed stuff
    for my $Needed (qw(Ticket UserID)) {
        if ( !defined $Param{$Needed} ) {
            $Self->{LogObject}->Log( Priority => 'error', Message => "Need $Needed!" );
            return;
        }
    }

    # get ticket attributes
    my %Ticket = %{ $Param{Ticket} };

    # get escalation properties
    my %Escalation;
    if ( $Self->{ConfigObject}->Get('Ticket::Service') && $Ticket{SLAID} ) {
        %Escalation = $Self->{SLAObject}->SLAGet(
            SLAID  => $Ticket{SLAID},
            UserID => $Param{UserID},
            Cache  => 1,
        );
    }
    else {
        %Escalation = $Self->{QueueObject}->QueueGet(
            ID     => $Ticket{QueueID},
            UserID => $Param{UserID},
            Cache  => 1,
        );
    }

    return %Escalation;
}
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Re: What is the use of Services and SLA in core OTRS?

Post by estomagado »

I don't know if you've seen this answer from 2014 on the Bugzilla ticket, but...

https://bugs.otrs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6372
Comment 3 Martin Gruner 2014-01-24 13:28:20 UTC

Bugzilla is has not been used to track enhancement requests since a long time now, therefore we're closing these entries now. Please feel free to take them to http://otrsteam.ideascale.com if they are still relevant.

Closing.
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