Is this fair?

[Tiddles]

Just re-read your last post. From what you say it seems to me that when you develop these SLAs you need to add a bit of fat for any possible 2nd & 3rd level support that might be needed. Basing the SLAs purely on an estimate of 1st level would be silly.

[UKVIKING]

Tiddles.. I still dont have an answer....

are you an incontient cat or a small barking rat..... FDL

The key ones you should track are

the submitted time
The closed time
the time it is moved to a hold state
the time it is moved out of a hold state
the time the SD or equivilent accepts it
the time the resolution groups notes - service restored

Now some of this can be done as activities in the ticket

The ticket will (should) must!! have a log associated

So the ticket itself will have the submitt / close date
Your staff if there is no ticket means should
enter ACKNOWLEDGE as a log entry - with DTG .. when they accept into the queue
enter SERVICE RESTORED....
etc etc
etc

Now... SLAs should be against ONLY incidents affecting the service

the SLA against requests should be different and on a different scale

[UKVIKING]

Tiddles...

You dont have to answer whether you are a cat or a dog.. as everyone could be a puppy on the Internet.. why else do we all search for cat videos (grin)

You are absolutely correct that the SLA needs to be a bit better thought out than just Nth level.

As for SLAs, there are SLAs and SLAs.

For example.

I had an SLA where the ticket once created would have to be responded to w/in N minutes.

As the ticket system acknowledges to the user when the ticket is created, this SLA will alway be met and with ease; therefore the SLA is specious completely.

A better SLA would be once raised, the ticket would be reviewed and assigned to a specific resolution team w/in X minutes of acknowledgement - IE put the onus on the Service Desk to process the requests quickly

A SLA to restore service should be based on the ability to restore service

A IM SLA should not be based on SOLVING the under lying problem as it will never be met..in major issues and outages.

[Tiddles]

Sorry should have asked this earlier: what does DTG stand for? Days to Go? Our system does appear to have a log but it could be an interesting exercise trying to write code that extracts time out of what essentially appears to be a text field. At least the date-time appears at the end of the log history entry so that's a start.

[UKVIKING]

DTG Date Time group

Most tools are able to export their data - log files etc - to a CSV File

Then you can use Excel to open the file

the only issue is whether you are using US Style or European style numbers in Excel and in the database CSV file

they have to match if you want excel to get the data date right

[Tiddles]

Date Time I understand but where does the group part come into it. Is this an itil term to describe a group of records that contain time based information like a history log?

[UKVIKING]

I am prior US military

Some terms creep out