SLA Setup Advice [SOLVED]

[davidbann]

Hi there,

I have a small company and have received my first support contract - I am in the process of putting the legal documents in place for the SLA, and I need an SLA management system to ensure we meet the SLA and can later report on it.

I have installed OTRS, but I am having trouble understanding the framework - I have read the documentation, but it is not very clear. It might actually be quite simple, but I do not have experience in SLA's so I am looking for advice.

For now, my company is going to provide SAP Basis support to one customer. This will grow further in the future to more services and more customers. I will explain how I need the system to work at the moment:
=====================================================
1. The client must log a support ticket via our OTRS website:
- Specify the ticket type (Service Request)
- Specify the service (SAP Basis Support)
- Specify Subject (Transport Required)
- Specify Details (transport number ... from .. to ... etc..)
- Specify the priority (HIGH)
- Submit
2. The SLA should then be calculated according to the service and priority chosen:
- If priority HIGH was selected, then a response time of 4 hours is needed. If NORMAL was selected, then a response time of 12 hours etc.
=====================================================

I have installed the ITSM module but it seems that it might be a bit too much for what I need - for example,
1. I don't see why the user would have to specify the queue - should this not automatically be determined by the service that they select?
2. Why would the user need to specify the priority as well as the SLA? Surely the one should be calculated by the other?
3. Can I determine which queue's/SLA's are available per customer?

Any advice will be much appreciated!

[davidbann]

Maybe my initial post had too much info in it - I guess what I really want to know is this:

Why ask the customer to specify a queue, service, SLA and priority when they create a web ticket?

I guess I can understand needing to specify a queue in order to give them a selection of services - this makes sense for when you have a lot of services to offer.

My confusion comes in with the SLA and priority - should your SLA not be determined by the priority? For example, if I select the "Gold" SLA which is configured to have a 4 hour response time, what does the priority really matter? The priority does not seem to affect anything other than for display purposes to the agents. Surely you should be able to specify the "Gold" SLA, and if priority is indicated as "low" then the SLA response time should be for example, 48 hours. If the priority is high, then the SLA response time should decrease to 4 hours. In effect, the SLA should be linked to the specified priority, or maybe impact and criticality. I might just be seeing things from the wrong perspective...

Please enlighten me if my understanding is wrong - I'm very new to OTRS so it's quite likely

[crythias]

My generic response to this is to make your own form that submits the questions via email (see http://www.jotform.com).

[davidbann]

Thanks I will look into that, but an immediate concern is that this option will render the customer dashboard useless... We can't really have a custom web form to submit their tickets, and then have them click on links in the auto-response emails to view their ticket in the OTRS dashboard - they will then play around and see that you can submit a new ticket from there, where the custom functionality is not supported... It will most likely cause confusion for users.

Does OTRS really not cater for severity based SLA's? While OTRS looks like an extremely powerful and flexible product, it seems as though its concept of an SLA is more synonymous with "priority".
In OTRS: 1 SLA = 1 response time, regardless of severity
In real life: 1 SLA = multiple response times, determined by severity

My intention is not to criticise the product at all - I am merely trying to understand it better so that I can use it to it's fullest extent.

Currently a user would be able to create a ticket with the "Super Fast Urgent 24 Hour Support" SLA, but also specify a "Very Low" priority - wouldn't really make sense...

If my understanding is correct, I suppose I could hide the "priority" on the user front-end, and change the word "SLA" to "Severity". I could then name my SLA's as severity levels, which would make more sense to the users...

[pekkaar]

Hi David,

in OTRS, Priority is just a very simple, static number -- the only thing it affects is the visual elements (GUI) on the web: for higher priority items the web components will be orange, or red -- which is a nice feature and the only thing that makes me using it. Plus you can report on it. That is it.

SLA on the other hand contains all three "escalation times" that OTRS supports, and it does have an effect on the ticket's duedates.

Yes, you (or the Customer) can set up a Critical SLA with LOW Priority... and it would not make sense. Yes, the best idea is to hide the Priority from the Customer's site and only manage it by your agents.

Regards,
Peter

[davidbann]

Thanks Peter - I appreciate your feedback! Very helpful...

[wojtekp]

David,

I have the same problem, and actually do not understand why such funcionality has not been coded in OTRS.
I'm not a programist, but IMHO making relation between priority and SLA should not be an issue. At least
not for OTRS developers, who made such a fantastic and flexible tool!

I've found some kind of work-around for this case. Fortunately you can use generic agent to change SLA in accordance with
priority. I have created few, which run every 10 minutes, and do the job Disadvantage of such solution is that you have to create separate
SLA for each priority. If you do not have too many specific SLAs for each customer, you end up with 5 SLAs for 5 priority levels. So not that bad, right?

Regards
Wojtek

[davidbann]

David,

I have the same problem, and actually do not understand why such funcionality has not been coded in OTRS.
I'm not a programist, but IMHO making relation between priority and SLA should not be an issue. At least
not for OTRS developers, who made such a fantastic and flexible tool!

I've found some kind of work-around for this case. Fortunately you can use generic agent to change SLA in accordance with
priority. I have created few, which run every 10 minutes, and do the job Disadvantage of such solution is that you have to create separate
SLA for each priority. If you do not have too many specific SLAs for each customer, you end up with 5 SLAs for 5 priority levels. So not that bad, right?

Regards
Wojtek

Thanks Wojtek - I eventually landed up doing exactly what you have suggested and I am sure that it will do the job. I appreciate your feedback, and hopefully your advice will help other newbies to OTRS - It is a great product and by far the most flexible one I have found. It would be nice if a SLA's were linked to priorities in a future release, but for now the Generic Agent will suffice.

[aditipawar34]

Hello,

May i know how is sla configured on the basis of priority through generic agent ??

Thanks,
Aditi

[crythias]

You don't need to link priority and SLA. If you do need to link priority and SLA, then rename (use a custom translation) SLA to priority.