[ForYourInformation -48] Comparing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Operational Agreements (OLAs)
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is an agreement signed between an IT team/service provider and users/customers to provide a particular level of service. It can take the form of a formal contract or a statement that may include several operational metrics.
SLA focuses on the service part of the agreement, like uptime of services and performance.
Unlike SLA, an Operational Level Agreement (OLA) is an agreement between the internal support groups of an organization that supports SLA. According to the Operational Level Agreement, each internal support group has certain responsibilities to other groups. The OLA clearly depicts the performance and relationship of the internal support groups.
It includes the details of how an SLA is achieved internally. This allows information such as your team structures to be hidden from the user/customer. The end-users typically view such information as meaningless noise anyway.
Example:
An organization may have a particular SLA that states "Maintenance window for computer equipment is 3 hours"; For the IT team to adhere to this SLA, there needs to be an OLA between the server team that will do patching of the servers, the desktop team that will patch the desktop systems, the DBAs to optimize the databases and so on.
SLA focuses on the service part of the agreement, like uptime of services and performance.
Unlike SLA, an Operational Level Agreement (OLA) is an agreement between the internal support groups of an organization that supports SLA. According to the Operational Level Agreement, each internal support group has certain responsibilities to other groups. The OLA clearly depicts the performance and relationship of the internal support groups.
It includes the details of how an SLA is achieved internally. This allows information such as your team structures to be hidden from the user/customer. The end-users typically view such information as meaningless noise anyway.
Example:
An organization may have a particular SLA that states "Maintenance window for computer equipment is 3 hours"; For the IT team to adhere to this SLA, there needs to be an OLA between the server team that will do patching of the servers, the desktop team that will patch the desktop systems, the DBAs to optimize the databases and so on.
The main objective of OLA is to ensure that all the support groups provide the intended Service Level Agreement and the IT function can provide the appearance of seamless service to the users.
Check this article for information on setting up SLAs and OLAs in ServiceDesk Plus. You might want to check our previous post that describes the Password Policy enhancements.