SLA management covers defining response and resolution targets, measuring them fairly, and handling breaches. How to set targets by priority, what to exclude from the clock, and how to report performance.
SLA management is the work of agreeing service level targets, measuring performance against them, and dealing with breaches before the customer raises them. The agreement itself is the easy part — most disputes come from what the clock counts. If your target says four hours and the customer counts from when they emailed while you count from when the ticket was triaged, both sides can report honestly and disagree completely.
Derive targets from your actual performance distribution rather than from what sounds impressive. Look at the last six months by priority, take the 90th percentile, and set the target there or slightly better. A target met 95% of the time creates trust and a manageable exception process; a target met 60% of the time creates a monthly argument and a credit negotiation. Where a customer demands tighter targets, price the cost of meeting them — staffing outside business hours is the usual driver.
Pausing the clock while waiting for the customer is standard and fair, but it is also the most abused mechanism in SLA management. Log every pause with a timestamp and the request that triggered it, or breach reports become unarguable only because they are unverifiable.
Ettex Records suits the tracking layer for teams without a dedicated service desk: one row per ticket with priority, received time, response and resolution timestamps, pause periods and breach flag, plus a monthly view by priority. Because pauses are recorded as data rather than as comments, the report can be reproduced when a customer questions it, alongside the underlying service level agreement.
An SLA is the commitment to the customer. An operational level agreement is the internal commitment between teams that makes the SLA achievable — for example, how quickly the infrastructure team responds to the support team.
Where the work is predictable, yes. For complex faults many providers commit to response time and to update frequency instead, which is more honest than a resolution target nobody can guarantee.
A contractual discount paid when targets are missed. They are common in enterprise contracts; the size should reflect the impact of the failure rather than act as a penalty that never gets claimed.
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