Gary Sherman writes on SLA Monitoring, and I thought what a wonderful problem to solve using rule engines and business rules technology.

Example of SLA’s (Extract from Sherman’s write-up)

• All cases must be responded to within 2 business hours
• All Urgent priority cases must be responded to within 1 hour regardless of business hours
• All cases must be responded to within the phone response time as stated on the contract
• All cases must be closed within 5 days.
• All sub-cases of type “Hardware Upgrade” must have a technician onsite within 36 hours.
• All new cases for a Gold level customer must get a call back from a senior tech within 1 hour.
• An initial response must occur within 8 business hours

The problem is essentially this

1. How do you ensure Support Level Agreements for each customer are met with?
2. Each Customer might have a slightly different SLA. By default companies might provide defaults like Gold, Silver etc.

A Rule based Solution

• A rule engine will essentially decide response depending upon a SLA for a given customer whenever a issue comes from a customer
• And each SLA will become a rule set, in my opinion in the rule repository

For example, you will have rules like below

• If Issue Severity is Level 1, Then Response Must go within 2 Hours
• If Issue Severity is Level 1, Then Updates Must go every 2 Hours
• If Issue Severity is Level 1, Then a Resolution Must go within 8 Hours

Why should you do this?

• The reasons are that the SLA and the contract will be visible and in a form that is easily changeable.
• It will be easy to get a semi or a non technical user to enter the SLA contract details into the System
• The SLA’s will be automatically externalized from the system, and adding new SLA’s will become much simpler that with code.
• The system can be programmed to determine the response based on the SLA by calling the rule engine (So much service like)
• Additional quality reports like if 3 responses violate the SLA, then escalate issue to Account Manager etc can be modeled much more easily than with conventional approaches like Stored Procs.

Final Words ..

The solution will of course me much more involved, and there are a lot more use cases, but the intent was to illustrate that this is a problem that can use a rule engine based solution.

Related Reading> Business Rules and Complex Event Processing