Context

Tool mentors explain how a tool can perform tasks, which are part of ITUP processes and activities. The tasks are listed as Related Elements in the Relationships section.

You can see the details of how processes and activities are supported by this tool mentor, by clicking the links next to the icons:

•   Service Catalog Management
  •   Build and Maintain Service Catalog Content

Details

In IBM® Tivoli® Service Level Advisor, an offering is a template that is used to describe a service, with agreed upon service levels, that forms the basis for the service level agreement ( SLA ) in which it is ultimately included. Offerings can be differentiated to provide service level choices to customers, such as Gold, Silver, and Bronze services, or any other naming convention that suggests a unique level of service.

An offering is associated with a business schedule that is defined with one or more schedule periods. Each schedule period is associated with a unique schedule state, such as peak, prime, standard, off hours, and others, and each of these states can be configured to represent a unique level of service for that schedule period. As a result, you can offer a wide range of service levels in your offering, while also providing for scheduled outages for maintenance or other downtime activities.

For example, suppose that you want to track and manage page-render and back-end response times for a department Web site in your enterprise, with the following service level objectives (SLOs) for maximum acceptable response times:

With IBM Tivoli Service Level Advisor you can define the business schedule for peak hours, off hours, and other states, and to define the service level objectives for page-render and back-end processing response times, including all of that information in an offering. The offering can then be published, making it available for inclusion in an SLA that is based on that level of service.

The portfolio contains three tasks related to offerings:

• Create Offering is for creating new offerings.
• Manage Offerings is for working with existing offerings. From the Manage Offerings page you can also create new offerings, and you can perform the following additional tasks:
  • Create a new offering from a copy of an existing offering.
  • Change the contents of an offering.
  • Delete an offering.
  • View the contents of an offering.
  • Publish an offering that is in the Draft state.
  • Withdraw a published offering.
• Replace Offering is a task related to managing SLAs. You can replace an offering that is included in one or more SLAs with another offering.

Chapter 2 of the IBM Tivoli Service Level Advisor: Managing Service Level Agreements, Version 2.1, IBM Corporation, SC32-1247-00, September 2004, page 27 covers the overall flow of data from the Tivoli Data Warehouse database through the Tivoli Service Level Advisor databases, and into the evaluation and reporting functions, resulting in Web-based reports for customers and internal users.

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