What are Service Level Agreements?

Service level agreement (SLA) is under certain overhead (usually this overhead is the main factor driving the provision of service quality). In order to ensure the performance and reliability of the service, service providers and users or service providers A mutually agreed upon definition.

Service level agreement (SLA) is a kind of service provider and user or service provider defined in order to guarantee the performance and reliability of the service under certain overhead (usually this overhead is the main factor driving the provision of service quality). A mutually agreed agreement. It specifies the service levels and performance levels that the service must meet (including service level measurement, service level reporting and reputation and cost), and makes the service provider responsible for completing these predetermined service levels. A complete SLA is also a legal document, including the parties involved, the applications and supported services included in the terms of the agreement, penalties for breach of contract, fees and arbitration agencies, policies, amendments, reporting forms, and obligations of both parties . Similarly, service providers can also regulate users in terms of workload and resource usage ^[1]

SLA first appeared in 1998 when the Frame Relay Forum launched its service level definition implementation agreement (ie, FRF13). This document defines acceptable parameters for several key characteristics of the Frame Relay business, such as frame transmission delay, frame transmission Rate, data transfer rate, and business availability (or uptime). In addition to describing specific performance and available parameters to Frame Relay users, FRF13 has an even more important purpose, which is to make Frame Relay providers confident that they can meet their own standards, thereby assuring their customers the ability to provide Trusted service. A variety of service providers followed, and the SLA industry began to sprout.

Leased lines and Frame Relay connections already have SLAs, and other services such as VPNs have quickly entered the ranks of SLAs.

• Additionality: SLA is based on the additional performance requirements of IT outsourcers' conventional service standards, such as reliability, security, and availability. Therefore, SLA is not a new service content, but a new service concept and method.

• Quantitative: SLA is based on one or more business performance indicators as the core content, and as the standard of the agreement between the two parties, its defined content requirements can be quantified, and the additional costs paid by customers and the responsibilities assumed by IT outsourcers are corresponding relationship.

• Risk: Customers pass the risk of possible business failure to the IT outsourcer through the SLA. The outsourcer also needs to bear the hidden operating costs caused by the lack of the ability to provide or guarantee the SLA business.

In the specific SLA terms, service providers and customers constitute the basic roles of the SLA, where customers refer to various entities that receive services based on contractual relationships, including companies or organizations and individuals involved in using the service provider to provide services. In IT outsourcing services, the customer is the ultimate purchaser of the service, and the user is an individual in the customer organization, not necessarily the main body of the service purchase. Service providers originally meant companies or organizations that provided telecommunications services. With the development of IT outsourcing, service providers in the SLA are not limited to telecommunications service providers, but also apply to various types of IT service providers in IT outsourcing, including the Internet. Service providers, network service providers, hosting service providers, computer maintainers, system integrators, etc. can also be IT departments within the enterprise. In the entire value chain of IT service provision, customers in one SLA may be service providers in another SLA, and service providers in the same SLA may be customers in another SLA, which has a transitive relationship ^{[3 ]}

The life cycle of the product and service corresponding to the SLA includes five stages:

1. Product and service development phase: For the SLA, the task of the development phase is to formulate an SLA template based on customer needs. The SLA template can be used for newly developed businesses or for existing businesses that lack SLAs or need to improve SLAs. The main tasks at this stage include: clarifying customer needs and mapping them into business characteristics, designing SLA service quality indicators, verifying technical feasibility, and formulating new SLA templates based on the existing resources of IT outsourcers.

2. Negotiation and sales: This stage is mainly completed by the business department of the IT outsourcer and the customer. It may also require the help of technical staff. The sales staff and the customer will conduct detailed negotiations based on the predefined SLA template, and discuss the quality in the SLA. Parameter indicators and penalties for violations are discussed and determined.

3. Implementation: the stage of service provision and activation. The main work of this stage is to formulate the business implementation plan. The technicians perform end-to-end SLA compliance testing on the service. Finally, the customer confirms whether the service meets the SLA requirements.

4. Implementation: During service operation, both parties will continuously collect service quality data, on the one hand, capture and monitor SLA violations in real time; on the other hand, periodically statistics and analyze service quality reports. SLA violation warning events will trigger preventive maintenance. SLA violation events will also trigger SLA violation processing. Periodic statistical analysis reports will be sent to customers and IT outsourcers. The customer-oriented report is for a single customer. The report for IT outsourcers will also integrate various types of information to provide reference data for analysis and network and business planning of outsourcers.

5. Evaluation: The evaluation here refers to a comprehensive and in-depth analysis and evaluation of the operation of the SLA over a long period of time. The purpose is to optimize the existing SLA business and provide a reference for the planning of new SLA products.

The entire cooperation process between customers and service providers runs through the entire life cycle of the SLA. Different SLA parameters and management methods need to be applied at different stages. The entire management and execution of the SLA is an iterative process. The application of the SLA actively promotes IT. The development process of outsourcing. In the next chapter, this article will summarize and summarize the development history and current status of SLA ^[3]

SLAs can provide many benefits to service providers, including ^[1]

SLAs that are not detailed or even vulnerable can protect service providers from penalties when there is a problem in the network, but they will harm the interests of users, make users feel deceived, and even lose users who are hard to win. The SLAs given in detailed terms not only better meet user expectations, but are also considered to be responsible for the user's interests, thus making service providers more competitive.

In the process of formulating SLAs with users, service providers will be able to better understand user requirements, reach consensus on service levels, and help service providers provide tiered services and charge corresponding fees based on service categories. With this detailed information, users can adjust their expectations of the SLA based on the services the service provider can actually provide and their own budget.

Currently, service providers may not realize the importance of the service reporting matrix. In the existing basic SLA, the matrix information includes network availability, network delay, and network fault repair time. These specifications will continue to be used in the future when defining basic SLAs. In addition, as the network connection becomes more and more important to commercial end users, the SLA matrix will also be appropriately modified or changed according to these user needs. The right SLA management platform enables service providers to take advantage of these new features of the SLA matrix to better serve users. A successful service provider should be able to develop and provide a measurable matrix that better reflects each user's connection.

The network has begun to infiltrate into all aspects of users' business activities. The loss caused by the collapse of the network to users is inestimable. Of course, users want the availability and stability of the network to be guaranteed. It is this demand of users that has promoted the development of service specification SLAs. The characteristics of the SLA matrix began with the simple counting of data packets and the measurement of latency, and gradually shifted to SLAs related to business activities. Service providers need to closely measure the SLA matrix related to business users, which requires a more advanced SLA platform. Increasing the SLA provided by service providers is a step-by-step process, and this process will provide service providers with an opportunity to better meet user needs.

Most existing service-level agreement contracts use the same matrix for all users, which may cause too much information to be provided for one user and insufficient for another. Therefore, future SLAs must target different user groups so that each user can get enough useful information. Of course, for service providers, this is a certain degree of difficulty, and they must continue to work on the basis of understanding this difficulty to come up with SLAs that satisfy customers. With the improvement of SLA and the emergence of OSS, service providers can add more detailed SLA management features to each SLA layer, making different SLAs more valuable to users, and it is worth their extra cost.

For service providers that guarantee a certain level of service, users will require them to prove that the services they provide do meet the set standards. Therefore, in the future SLA, in addition to providing users with a pure policy mechanism, service providers should also enable users to understand the performance of the entire network in a timely manner. This additional information will not only help users locate the fault, quickly find the cause of the problem, so that the problem can be resolved faster, but also help users understand whether they have applied for the correct service.

The existing SLA clauses also provide corresponding provisions for situations where the quality of service cannot meet the predetermined goals. For example, the user has the right to terminate the agreement without any economic penalty, the user has the right to request financial compensation from the service provider, etc. The user expects to obtain the same level of management on the WAN as on the LAN, and those who cannot meet the negotiated SLA Service providers that cannot provide financial compensation cannot win users. However, with the increasing dependence of business activities on network services, users are more and more concerned about the impact of reduced service quality on business activities themselves, and are no longer just satisfied with the financial compensation provided by service providers for this purpose. In the event of a crash, there are other remedies to save the impact on business activities.

The future SLA proposes a concept of true payment based on service quality, requiring service providers to meet certain service level goals. If the quality of service provided by the service provider meets the predetermined basic goal, the user pays the regular fee; if the quality of service provided by the service provider reaches the higher target specified by the SLA, the user pays some additional expenses for this. In order to obtain additional profits, the service provider must think of improving the quality of the services provided. This requires a scalable, flexible and reliable SLA management platform to facilitate the processing of back-end system information ^[2] .