Service Level Agreement
Information Technology Services
The University of Texas at Austin
Effective Date: 1/9/2009
Score
Overview
The uTexas Enterprise Directory (TED) is a restricted-access directory service that provides an enterprise-level consolidated set of identity, affiliation, and related information about students, faculty, staff, and university associates. The main purpose of TED is to provide information for use by UT employees and departments to 1) retrieve identity and affiliation information 2) authenticate UT EID holders when logging onto department systems, and 3) allow department systems to control access to resources based on information stored in TED. For more information, please see: http://www.utexas.edu/its/ted/index.php.
This service level agreement formalizes the partnership between ITS and its TED customers for the purpose of defining the service expectations and identifying the roles, responsibilities and service objectives of this partnership.
Review Process
This document defines the service practices that Information Technology Services (ITS) will use for the uTexas Enterprise Directory (TED) service. This SLA is a living document and should be reviewed by each TED customer of this agreement.
Conventions
Unless otherwise indicated, business hours are from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. during normal business days, Monday through Friday, excluding holidays and reduced schedule days.
Scope
The following user communities at the university are the intended recipients for the uTexas Enterprise Directory (TED) service: 1) Application developers and owners who require identity, affiliation, and related information for students, faculty, staff, and university associates in order to provide authentication and/or authorization services for their own customers; 2) Owners of other enterprise-level and local level directories and their customers.
Service Criticality
This service has been identified as Critical , based on the ITS Critical Services Assessment Criteria. Please refer to the Critical Services Assessment Criteria for more information on the assessment methodology.
Service Description
For the purposes of this SLA, in scope services include:
- Management of the uTexas Enterprise Directory (TED) Production (PROD) environment to ensure timely delivery of identity information to customers.
- Provision of TED User Accounts for individual access to identity information (http://www.utexas.edu/its/ted/answers/accounts.php)
- Provision of TED Service Accounts to provide application access to identity information (http://www.utexas.edu/its/ted/answers/accounts.php)
- Request of new TED identity Attributes (http://www.utexas.edu/its/ted/answers/newattribute.php)
- High-level application development consultation
The following services are out of scope:
- Customer application code and content of customer systems will not be managed by ITS and is out of scope through this SLA.
- LDAP Browser client issues are not supported by ITS under this SLA.
Supported Computing Environment
All services detailed in this SLA refer to the TED production (PROD) environment. ITS provides access to the PROD environment through a consolidated LDAPv3-based interface. Use of this interface requires an LDAPv3-based client. ITS recommends using http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/~gawor/ldap/download.html. As of 01/09/2009, version 2.8.2 or higher is needed to verify passwords in TED. The minimum required version is subject to change. This change will be communicated to customers at least 1 month in advance. Please note that LDAP Browser client issues are not supported by ITS under this SLA.
Technical Support
Customer support and TED production incident resolution are provided through one of two paths, depending upon whether the support required is for access requests to TED (Tier 1) or TED production environment issues (Tier 2).
Tier 1 TED Access Requests and General Customer Support
Application owners and developers requesting TED access or requiring customer support should use the following process:
- For TED access requests, service requests, application development consultation, and schema change requests please open a ticket with the ITS Help Desk (512-475-9400).
- For general information regarding TED including processes please see: http://www.utexas.edu/its/ted/index.php
The ITS Help Desk will escalate all tickets to the ITS Identity and Access Management Team (IAM) TED Administrators. The TED Administrators will then contact the customer within one business day .
Service delivery times are detailed in Table 1 below:
Table 1: Tier 1 Published Service Delivery Times
| Category | Measurement | Time |
|---|---|---|
| User Account Request | Time from request to access | Up to 1 business week |
| Service Account Request | Time from request to access | Up to 1 business month* |
| Schema Change Request | Time from request to change | Case by case basis |
| General Info & questions | Time to respond to inquiry | 1 business day |
* Please note that the length of time required to deliver TED User and Service accounts is dependent upon whether the customer requests authorization to access confidential or restricted information controlled by the managers of the systems from which that information is derived. It is the goal of ITS to resolve 80% of requests within 1 business month .
Tier 2 TED Production Support
To ensure timely delivery of identity data to customers, TED production (PROD) environment support is focused on the following core objectives:
- Rapid restoration of service to the agreed predefined level
- Minimizing business impact
- Implementing fixes/workarounds
- Minimizing number of escalations/interactions required to resolve incident
- Reduction of issues that require re-opening.
TED's PROD environment automatically alerts the ITS TED Administrators in the event of an outage. Customers identifying a TED environment issue in PROD should immediately alert the ITS Help Desk (512-475-9400) or the TED Administrators directly.
Hours of coverage and response time to incidents is detailed in Table 2 below:
Table 2: Tier 2 TED Environment Support Service Levels
| Category | PROD |
|---|---|
| Support Hour Coverage | 24x7x365 |
| Outage Time to Repair | 30 Minutes |
| Incident time to respond to alert* | -- |
| Critical Incident | 30 min |
| High Priority Incident | 30 min |
| Medium Priority Incident | 60 min |
| Low Priority Incident | N/A |
*independent of time to repair
Description of Incident Levels
Critical Incident: Mission critical production server/service is down. No workarounds exist. Multiple user populations impacted (MUO). Business halted/No work can be accomplished.
High Priority Incident : Significant business impact. Mission critical production is down but workarounds may exist. Multiple user populations impacted (MUO). Also used when mission important production systems are down without a workaround. Ability to work significantly impacted.
Medium Priority Incident: Mission important system/server may be down but workarounds exists. Work can continue in a restricted fashion.
Low Priority Incident : Minor loss of service. Impact is an inconvenience, which may require a workaround to restore functionality.
Service Availability
This section provides information about the normal schedule of times when TED services are available, the times specified for scheduled maintenance, and defines expectations for reporting service problems and changes to TED customers.
Normal Service Availability
TED is designed to be available for customer use 24-hours per day, seven days per week, 365 days per year. Due to the criticality of the TED service, ITS has a goal of 99.9% availability of the TED production environment.
Table 3: TED Availability Requirement
| Category | PROD |
|---|---|
| Production Availability Goal, including maintenance | 99.9% |
In order to ensure TED's availability goal, ITS has implemented a redundant n+2 architecture. This architecture allows for rolling software upgrades and other planned maintenance outages without impact to the availability of TED's services. ITS has also implemented business continuity and disaster recovery processes to maintain TED's availability which include documentation, testing, and validation of disaster recovery procedures.
Scheduled Maintenance
The redundancy built into TED's services means that no formal scheduled maintenance window is required. However, should scheduled maintenance be required, it will be scheduled during non-peak hours for 15 minutes once a year. ITS will communicate all scheduled maintenance based on its published change notification.
Problem Reporting and Change Notification
ITS will notify customers using the ITS Services Status page of service availability and service delivery issues for the uTexas Enterprise Directory (TED). Application developers and owners who depend upon the TED service will receive additional updates from the ITS Identity and Access Management Team (IAM). Table 4 details standard published communications and times:
Table 4: Problem Reporting & Change Notification Communications
| Category | Response |
|---|---|
| Outage Communication | 90 min after response |
| Scheduled Downtime Communication | Ten business days in advance |
| Customer operations contact must be named as point of communication | Yes |
| Incident post-mortem | No more than 2 weeks after incident |
Key Service Indicators
List of Metrics and Measures
In order to maintain customer satisfaction, ITS will measure the performance of TED services against key service indicators. Table 6 lists the key service delivery metrics for the TED service:
Table 5: Key SLA Metrics
| Category | Definition | Performance Target |
|---|---|---|
| Production Availability | Percent time of year that TED service is available. | 99.9% |
| Customer Satisfaction | Percent of customers who are Satisfied or Very Satisfied with TED services | 90% |
Dependencies
TED is dependent upon the University Data Center power, the network, related systems, and the uTexas Identity Manager (TIM). Should any of these systems be unavailable, the availability of TED services will be directly impacted. TED is also dependent upon the source systems of record from which student, employee, and university associate identity information is derived.
Service Report Card
ITS will publish performance for this service in the public ITS Services Report Card.
Other Party Responsibilities
In addition to the services provided by ITS, subscribers (users) of the service and identified owners/administrators agree to certain important responsibilities. All parties agree to be aware of and adhere to the university's Acceptable Use Policy.
User/Subscriber Responsibilities
Customers who agree to this SLA must:
- Adhere to all FERPA rules if restricted student data is used.
- Adhere to the TED Acceptable Use Policy (AUP).
- Adhere to university information acceptable use.
Cost of Service
There is no direct billable end-user or departmental cost for this service.
