SLA, support levels and ticket system

In short: An SLA (service level agreement) defines what service an IT provider delivers and at what quality. Support is organised in levels (1 to 3), and requests flow through a ticket system.

In more detail: The SLA names availability (for example 99.9 % per month), response time, resolution time, service hours and consequences of breaches. The ticket system records requests, assigns priority and responsibility and documents the solution.

In Depth

• Calculating availability: 99.9 % per month (30 days = 43,200 minutes) allows about 43 minutes of downtime. 99 % allows about 7.2 hours.
• First-level support: intake, standard solutions, forwarding. Second level: specialist knowledge. Third level: developers, manufacturer.
• Priorities: impact × urgency (for example total outage = high).
• Incident vs. problem: An incident is a disruption, a problem the cause behind it.
• ITIL: collection of best practices for IT service management.
• Escalation: If a solution takes too long, involve a higher level or supervisors.
• Satisfaction: feedback after closing.

See also: Protection goals of information security, Health check and status page