Service-level objective
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A service level objective (SLO) is a key element of a service level agreement (SLA) between a service provider and a customer. SLOs are agreed upon as a means of measuring the performance of the Service Provider and are outlined as a way of avoiding disputes between the two parties based on misunderstanding.
Overview
There is often confusion in the use of SLAs and SLOs. The SLA is the entire agreement that specifies what service is to be provided, how it is supported, times, locations, costs, performance, and responsibilities of the parties involved. SLOs are specific measurable characteristics of the SLA such as availability, throughput, frequency, response time, or quality. These SLOs together are meant to define the expected service between the provider and the customer and vary depending on the service's urgency, resources, and budget. SLOs provide a quantitative means to define the level of service a customer can expect from a provider[1].
The SLO may be composed of one or more quality of service (QoS) measurements (service level indicators, SLIs) that are combined to produce the SLO achievement value. As an example, an availability SLO may depend on multiple components, each of which may have a QoS availability measurement. The combination of QoS measures into an SLO achievement value will depend on the nature and architecture of the service.
Examples
In [2] the authors argue that SLOs must be:
- Attainable
- Repeatable
- Measurable
- Understandable
- Meaningful
- Controllable
- Affordable
- Mutually acceptable
In [3] the authors define a SLO as "commitment to maintain a particular state of the service in a given period" with respect to the state of the SLA parameters. They also state that while service providers will most often be the lead entity in taking on SLOs there is no firm definition as such and any entity can be responsible for an SLO. Along with this an SLO can be broken down into a number of different components.
- Obliged - The entity that is required to deliver the SLO.
- Validity Period - The time in which the SLO will be delivered.
- Expression - This is the actual language that defines what the SLO will be.
Optionally an EvaluationEvent maybe assigned to the SLO, an EvaluationEvent dictates the measure by with the SLO will be checked to see if it's meeting the Expression.
In [4] the authors define the SLO as "the quality of service aspect of the agreement. Syntactically, it is an assertion over the terms of the agreement as well as such qualities as date and time".
SLOs should generally be specified in terms of an achievement value or service level, a target measurement, a measurement period, and where and how they are measured. As an example, "90% of calls to the helpdesk should be answered in less than 20 seconds measured over a one-month period as reported by the ACD system". Results can be reported as a percent of time that the target answer time was achieved and then compared to the desired service level (90%).
| Type of Measure | Example SLO Requirement | Measurement Period |
|---|---|---|
| Availability | The application will be available 99.95% of the time | Over a year |
| Service Desk Response | 75% of help desk calls will be answered in less than a minute
85% of help desk calls will be answered within two minutes 100% of help desk calls will be answered within three minutes |
Over a month |
| Incident Response Time | 99% of severity 1 tickets will be resolved within three hours
98% of severity 2 tickets will be resolved within eight hours 98% of severity 3 tickets will be resolved within three business days 98% of severity 4 tickets will be resolved within five business days |
Over a quarter |
| Response Time | 85% of TCP replies within 1.5 seconds of receiving a request
99.5% of TCP replies within 4 seconds of receiving a request |
Over a month |
Term Usage
The use of the term SLO is deprecated in ITIL V3 to Service Level Target, not to be confused with Service Level Requirement defined in the service design. However the SLO term is found in various scientific papers, for instance in the reference architecture of the SLA@SOI project,[5] and it is used in the Open Grid Forum document on WS-Agreement.[4]
References
- ^ Rastegari, Yousef; Shams, Fereidoon (2015-12-29). "Optimal Decomposition of Service Level Objectives into Policy Assertions". The Scientific World Journal. 2015: 1–9. doi:10.1155/2015/465074. ISSN 2356-6140. PMC 4709918. PMID 26962544.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link) - ^ Rick Sturm, Wayne Morris "Foundations of Service Level Management", April 2000, Pearson.
- ^ Alexander Keller, Heiko Ludwig "The WSLA Framework: Specifying and Monitoring Service Level Agreements for Web Services", Journal of Network and Systems Management, Vol 11, n. 1, March 2003.
- ^ a b Alain Andrieux, Karl Czajkowski, Asit Dan, Kate Keahey, Heiko Ludwig, Toshiyuki Nakata, Jim Pruyne, John Rofrano, Steve Tuecke, Ming Xu "Web Services Agreement Specification (WS-Agreement)", GFD-R-P.107, March 2007, Open Grid Forum.
- ^ Jens Happe, Wolfgang Theilmann, Andrew Edmonds, and Keven T. Kearney "A Reference Architecture for Multi-Level SLA Management" in "Service Level Agreements for Cloud Computing", eds. Wieder, Philipp and Butler, Joe M. and Theilmann, Wolfgang and Yahyapour, Ramin, Springer New York, 2011, DOI:10.1007/978-1-4614-1614-2_2