A service level agreement lists twenty individual measures such as CPU utilisation, network latency and patch currency, but no measure of what the customer is trying to achieve. Why is this a weakness?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 7. Seven ITIL practices in detail medium
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The options
Not correct Operational metrics belong in an operational level agreement, and may never appear in a customer-facing agreement
Too absolute. Component and operational measures can be useful supporting detail; the failure is having only those, with nothing that expresses the customer's desired outcome.
Not correct Twenty measures is too many; an agreement should never contain more than a handful of targets
The problem is what the measures are about, not how many there are. A count limit is not the principle; relating targets to outcomes is.
Correct Service level agreements should relate to defined outcomes, ideally through a balanced bundle of measures, rather than to operational metrics alone
Correct. Targets tied to defined outcomes — supported by a balance of measures such as business results and customer satisfaction — tell you whether the service is actually helping the customer.
Not correct Technical measures cannot be monitored reliably enough to be used as agreed targets
These measures are usually the easiest of all to collect reliably. Ease of measurement is precisely why organizations over-use them and end up measuring the wrong thing well.
Why
A good SLA expresses what the customer wants to achieve, not just how the components behaved. Component metrics are easy to collect and easy to hit, which is how organizations end up with agreements that are met in full while the customer's outcome is not. The corrective principle is outcome-related targets carried by a balanced bundle of measures, not a cap on the number of targets or a ban on technical data.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 7
- What it says
- SLAs should relate to defined outcomes rather than simply operational metrics, using balanced bundles of measures such as customer satisfaction and key business outcomes.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 7 and space the ones you get wrong.