Tutorial 9 - Monitoring SLAs

TIBCO Business Studio allows you to set Service Level Agreement (SLA) thresholds for Activity Delay and Participant Utilization. When you simulate the Process, TIBCO Business Studio displays visual cues when these thresholds are exceeded.

Procedure

  1. Open the Renewal Process.
  2. Click the Quote Activity. In the Properties view, specify 5.5 as the Maximum Delay SLA. This means that our SLA specifies that a credit check should take no more than three minutes.
  3. In the Project Explorer, click the Insurance Agent Participant. In the Properties view for the Participant, enter 65 for the Minimum Utilization SLA (%) and 85 for Maximum Utilization SLA (%). This means that our SLA requires that the Participant be busy at least 65% of the time up to a maximum of 85% of the time.
    Note: While it is possible to require that the maximum utilization for a Participant is 100%, in practice this is rarely the case because of holiday, ancillary tasks, sickness and so on.
  4. Simulate the Process. The SLA information is displayed next to the Activity in the third and fourth columns. For example:

    The color of the bar is red in the third column because the SLA is not being met. Specifically the Quote activity is taking longer than we would like it to. In some cases the threshold is displayed in red, but the bar is green like this:

    This means that the threshold was exceeded, but the overall utilization was within the SLA.

  5. In this example, the Renewal Process has 100 instances of the Insurance Agent Participant. By looking at the simulation, we can see that this Participant appears under-utilized (at about 6%). Experiment with changing the number of Insurance Agents. For example, with six Insurance Agents, the results should show utilization within the SLA:
  6. Looking at the Quote Activity, it has a duration of 4, standard deviation of 1 and a threshold of 5.5. This means that running this simulation results in the average delay exceeding the threshold. Whether this is acceptable is a business specific decision on your part.