Best practice - SLA Measure

[Timothy Yanosko]

We're a AE V9 shop with no other Automic products.  

I like the community's feedback on a best practice 

I’ve been asked to develop a method which allows for service level agreement (SLA) tracking of multiple workflows.

For example:   The SLA is met when both WorkflowA and WorkflowB complete at 4:00 pm.  WorkflowA begins at 1:00 pm and WorkflowB at 2:30 pm . The SLA is met if both WorkflowA and WorkflowB complete by 4:00 pm.

Option 1:  Create a job (SLAMADE) which will have a predecessor of the successful completion of both WorkflowA and WorkflowB and use the end time of SLAMADE as the measure of the SLA .  If in a few months from now WorkflowC (starts at 11:00 am) was added to meet the SLA, it would be added as a predecessor to SLAMADE.

Option 2.  Have workflows A and B contained inside a third workflow (Workflowmaster).  Workflowmaster would begin at 12:59 pm .  Once WorkflowA and WorkflowB complete, Workflowmaster would end and that would be used as the measurement.  If in a few months WorKflowC  (starts at 11:00 am) was added to meet the SLA  it would have to add it to Workflowmaster and the start time of Workflowmaster adjusted to 11:29 am. 

Option 3.  Another option from the community?

Any and all opinions are appreciated and Happy Holidays!

[Pete Wirfs]

It is unclear as to what needs to happen when your SLA is not met.  At this shop when we miss an SLA, we send email alerts to appropriate staff.  These emails tell them what procedures need to be followed on a case-by-case basis.

We would run a workflow at 4:00 pm that would utilize the "CHECK HISTORY" capabilities of task precondition rules to determine if the SLA has been met or not, and take appropriate action.

[Anon Anon]

You may want to review the "how to notify if job hasn't started by a certain time?" thread.  Perhaps there is something in there that you could use or adapt.

[Timothy Yanosko]

Pete -- In this case I'm simply being asked to report if we've met SLA.  Activities around missing (or making) the SLA are out of scope.  This is purely from a design perspective.  Is it better to have one master workflow containing all other workflows, or have the reporting mechanism outside of the workflows (a watcher of all workflows).

Mark - I'll look into that thread.

Thanks to all.

[Pete Wirfs]

It would also be possible to run an SQLI query against the UC4 database to check all of the run history for the objects in question.  This method could check your SLA compliance over a wide date range.

[Anon Anon]

You might also want to investigate the UCYBDBRT batch utility for simple reporting.

[Jessica Isaacson]

I think that having a parent workflow with two subchains is probably much simpler. However, a couple of things to look out for if you use that approach:
- If the two subchains are functionally independent of each other, you need to make sure the parent workflow doesn't create false dependencies. For example, if workflow A got blocked for 2 days, then the parent would remain active; if the parent doesn't allow parallel runs, then workflow B would also not start for 2 days, even though it shouldn't be affected by problems with workflow A.  Even if the parent workflow does allow parallel runs, if it is run by a recurring task, then it might be seen as "already running" and also not start.
- In Activities hierarchical view, blocked (or other problem) statuses don't display at the top level for child workflows. So if workflow A is blocked, but you are looking at the parent workflow in hierarchical view, the status will be displayed as Active, and everything will still look green and happy. Depending on your monitoring methods, this may or may not be important to you.

[Timothy Yanosko]

Thanks all.  Your input is much appreciated.