Operational-level agreement

An operational-level agreement (OLA) is an internal contract that defines the service level targets expected from different teams within your organization. OLAs are customer account agnostic, and they are usually created to ensure that internal stakeholders have their own targets, which in turn helps meet the customer SLAs.

Create an OLA 

You can create OLAs for issues.

1. Go to Settings > Service Level Agreements > OLAs > + Create.
2. In the Create OLA window, enter a name and description for the OLA.

By default, the OLA is created in the Draft state. You can assign policies to the OLA as needed.

Create policies within an OLA

1. Click + Issue Policy.
2. In the New Issue Policy pane, select the appropriate Conditions and Metrics. Install the OLA metrics for issues snap-in as prompted to access the Issue Resolution Time metric, see Defining OLA Metrics for details.
3. Click Continue.

You can set breach and warning targets for Issue Resolution Time by selecting between calendar or business hours for calculation. Multiple policies can be created within an OLA, and they are applied based on priority if an issue meets conditions in more than one policy.

Publish an OLA

After creating the necessary policies, click Publish to activate the OLA.

Once an OLA is published, it cannot be edited, nor can you modify the policies or their priority order.

Only one OLA can be in the Published state at any time. If there is an existing published OLA, it is archived when you publish a new one. Any new issues will follow the guidelines of the newly-published OLA, while issues previously managed by the old OLA remain unaffected.

Clone an OLA

If you need to modify an existing OLA, you can clone it. Cloning duplicates all the policies from the original OLA and generates a new OLA in the draft stage.

To clone an OLA, go to the desired OLA, click the three-dot menu (⋮) in the top right corner, and select Clone OLA.

Defining OLA metrics

You can specify which issue stages trigger the OLA metric timer to start, pause, and stop. This configuration is available through the OLA metrics for issues snap-in. Issue Resolution Time is the default metric. For additional metrics, contact our support team.

1. Go to Settings > Integrations > Snap-ins.
2. Locate and view the OLA metrics for issues snap-in.
3. Click on Configure within the snap-in.
4. Select stage values for the Issue Resolution Timer to start, pause, and stop. Resuming a paused timer requires no additional configuration; it automatically resumes when the issue stage updates to any stage not designated for stopping the timer.
5. Click Save.

Assigning stage values for starting and stopping the timer is mandatory. Ensure that each stage value is unique across the start, pause, and stop options. Any configuration changes will only apply to issues created after the changes are made.

Uninstalling the snap-in will remove the OLA metric from all active and new issues, which is not recommended.

Tracking OLAs on issues

In the issues view, the Next OLA Target column displays the OLA targets for each issue. If there are two active metrics, the one closest to breaching is shown as the Next OLA Target. Negative values ( -10m) indicate how much time has passed since a metric was breached.

OLA metrics can be in the following stages:

• Active: The metric is currently being tracked.

• Close to Breach: The time spent meets or exceeds the close-to-breach target set in the policy.

• Breached: The time spent meets or exceeds the breach target set in the policy.

• Paused: The metric is paused based on stage conditions in the snap-in.

• Completed: The stop condition has been met.

Metrics in the Active, Close to Breach, or Breached stages may follow business hours, moving in and out of schedule without including out-of-schedule time in calculations.

In the Detailed view, all applied metrics and their stages can be reviewed for an issue.

Filtering issues by next OLA target

To filter issues based on OLA, use the Next OLA Target filter. Here's how the filter operates:

• All: Filters all issues that currently have an OLA applied. It does not include issues that had an OLA metric applied in the past and have been completed.

• Breached Since:

  • Any: Issues that have breached the SLA, regardless of when the breach occurred.
  • Over an Hour: Filters issues that have been in breach for more than one hour.
  • Over a Day: Filters issues that have been in breach for more than one day.
  • Custom: Filters issues that have been in breach since a specified date.

• Will Breach In:

  • Any: Filters all issues that are currently not in breach.
  • Over an Hour: Filters issues with less than one hour left before breaching.
  • Over a Day: Filters issues with less than one day left before breaching.
  • Custom: Filters issues that will breach by a selected date.