Service Level Management is meant to ensure that your IT and business organizations can run smoothly with a clear framework that helps you guarantee delivery on promised services.
With SolarWinds Service Desk you can manage your SLAs, monitor and analyze breaches, and alert relevant teams automatically, whenever service expectations are not being met.
Since meeting SLAs is key to your service performance, we constantly look for ways to improve your ability to monitor and manage them. The following enhancements were designed to help you do that - more quickly and efficiently.
New Report: Service Level Breaches Percentage Over Time
So you have all of your SLAs in place, and you and your team try your best to minimize the number of SLA breaches. But how can you tell that over time, the percentage of incidents with breaches actually decreases and that your efforts bear fruit?
The percentage of breaches over time, can be a key performance indicator (KPI) for you to track your service performance trends by different departments, categories, teams, assignees and more.
Figure 1: Service Level Breaches Percentage Over Time Report
The new report’s columns are showing the percentage of open incidents with SLA breaches that occurred in the selected time frame. In the above example, you can see all of the open incidents that had an SLA breach in the last 30 days, by assignee.
By hovering over the dots on the grey trend line, you can see the total number of open incidents per time resolution, and review the SLA Breach Percentage metric in this context. For example, the total number of open incidents for the week of April 12 is 202,399, while the total SLA Breach percentage* was 0.17%.
Let’s take a look at Jane Lee (the top yellow stack). We noticed that on the week of March 16th, she had a rather high percentage of SLA breaches. Looking into her tickets we learned that due to the newly adopted COVID-19 Work-from-Home (WHF) policy, a lot of employees needed assistance with setting up their VPN. Since Jane has just joined the team recently, and had less experience with this particular task, troubleshooting each case was a very time-consuming process. We decided to give her some air cover from Max Resnic and Michael Van - who helped to clear the backlog, while also training her further - until this was no longer an issue. As time went by, she gained more and experience and we can see that her trend of SLA breaches has decreased significantly (from 0.08% to 0.02%).
This is just one example of how you can get visibility into service delivery issues, while also tracking your team’s progress after taking the relevant actions to mitigate them. If you see the trend of SLA Breaches Percentage decreasing - this means you’re on the right track!
*The report is showing incidents with SLA breaches that were open at the time resolution selected (regardless of when they have been created or closed). This includes incidents that were opened in State = Closed (AKA, first-time resolution).
Adjustments to the ‘Service Level Breaches’ Report
Up until now, the Service Level Breaches report showed incidents that had SLA breaches during a selected time frame, by their creation date. For example, an incident that was created on Mar 9th but had a breach on April 4th, would be shown on the report by the incident’s creation date.
Figure 2: Service Level Breaches Report
To present you with more accurate and actionable information - starting today, the report will show incidents that had SLA breaches during a selected time frame, according to the time the breach happened. In this particular example, we will see this incident on April 4th, and not Mar 15th - since this is when the breach happened.
SLA / Automation Index and Page enhancements
We have updated the look and feel of the SLA Index, the Automation Index and the SLA Page to provide you with more visibility into your service level management:
- New Pre-Breach Threshold column: admins can now review the new Pre-Breach Thresholds column, to quickly learn about the initial and final threshold times set for different SLAs.
- Action & Scope column view: by hovering over the Action and Scope columns, you get more visibility into the settings of each line.
- Editing SLAs: you can reach the SLA page and edit it by clicking on its name or by clicking the Edit option in the Actions column.
Figure 3: SLA Index enhancements
As we continue to improve SolarWinds Service Desk, we appreciate your feedback. Let us know what you think about these enhancements!
