Service Level Agreements in ITIL© and IT Service Management terms allow two parties to set out an agreement on how a specific service will be delivered by one to the other.
In this chapter we will provide recipes to configure Service Manager 2012's SLA engine. We will define how it will handle the tracking of Incidents and Service Requests against defined SLAs, how to view the progress of work items against these SLAs and how to configure Service Manager 2012 to alert users when work items are nearing, or have breached, these Service Level Agreements.
As with most areas of configuration within Service Manager 2012, the organization must define its processes before implementing the Service Manager feature. For example, this chapter assumes that Service Level Agreements are already in place and agreed with your customers and metrics relating to areas such as resolution time or response times, mapped to priorities are defined.