| Overview | Audience | Deliverables | Purchase | Table of Contents |
Database SLA - Operations Level Agreement (OLA) for Big and Large Databases
Good SLAs are based on good OLAs!
Enables the DBA Team to prepare Standard (silber, gold, platin)-Database OLAs!
Helps the Service Manager to ask for the appropriate service details.
Helps the Service Manager to ask for the appropriate service details.
Using this 30+ page template you will define and agree on a better OLA in a shorter time!
Overview
If a Service Level Manager needs to offer to Business a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for an End-to-End IS/IT-Service, he sign this SLA only after he arranged within IS/IT for each system or component used to provide this service an Operations Level Agreement (OLA) with the providing team or department.
The four terms "Operations Level Agreement", "Operational Level Agreements", "Operating Level Agreements" and "Organizational Level Agreement" are used equal in relevant published literature.
OLA's are agreements between different IS/IT-departments,
the SLA is the overall agreement between IS/IT and the business department.
the SLA is the overall agreement between IS/IT and the business department.
This document provides a template for such an Operations Level Agreement (OLA) for big and large Databases containing the agreed values and for QA-purpose also the measures implemented to reduce the likelihood of violations of those agreed values.
Too often only the availability (e.g. 99.9%) is associated with an SLA or OLA, but a real OLA contains a complete list of all services (tasks) which will be provided to which extend and with which quality and defines which of those are part of the "standard support" and which will be charged extra.
This Mercury template contains a comprehensive list of services provided / tasks done by System DBA's. In case that the project team does not request (and pay for) certain (extended) services, the author suggests to rather check the checkbox "NO" (best with an explanation) than to delete those from the agreement. This avoids discussions about "we were not aware that this is not included" which usually start after some unpleasant things happened.
Additionally a template for a (monthly) Service Level Report (SLR) is provided.
This Operating Level Agreement (OLA) specific for big and large databases does not only deal with availability, but many more topics. It also contains a comprehensive service catalog of advanced DBA services and a template for the Service Level Reporting (SLR).
This database OLA is an important pre-requisit for the service level manager to agree with business on an SLA (Service Level Agreement).
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AudienceFrequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Question: What is the difference between an Operational Level Agreement (OLA) and a Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
Answer:
For one system or application there exists usually one SLA between IT and Business, and this SLA is backed up within IT by several OLA's between different IT departments and external service providers.
In case that the database service is provided by an external service provider, then the term "Database SLA" shall be used; in this case an "underpinning contract" is of course required too.
However, the term "Database SLA" is frequent used where "Database OLA" would be correct.
More Background Information we provide in: An introduction into Operations Level Agreements (OLA) and the difference to Service Level Agreements (SLA)