information technology Information technology (IT) is a set of related fields within information and communications technology (ICT), that encompass computer systems, software, programming languages, data processing, data and information processing, and storage. Inf ...

, a service level indicator (SLI) is a measure of the

service level Service level measures the performance of a system, service or supply. Certain goals are defined and the service level gives the percentage to which those goals should be achieved. Examples of service level: * Percentage of calls answered in a ca ...

provided by a

service provider A service provider (SP) is an organization that provides services, such as consulting, legal, real estate, communications, storage, and processing services, to other organizations. Although a service provider can be a sub-unit of the organization t ...

to a customer. SLIs form the basis of service level objectives (SLOs), which in turn form the basis of

service level agreement A service-level agreement (SLA) is an agreement between a service provider and a customer. Particular aspects of the service – quality, availability, responsibilities – are agreed between the service provider and the service user. T ...

s (SLAs); an SLI can be called an SLA metric (also ''customer service metric'', or simply ''service metric''). Though every system is different in the services provided, often common SLIs are used. Common SLIs include latency,

throughput Network throughput (or just throughput, when in context) refers to the rate of message delivery over a communication channel in a communication network, such as Ethernet or packet radio. The data that these messages contain may be delivered ov ...

availability In reliability engineering, the term availability has the following meanings: * The degree to which a system, subsystem or equipment is in a specified operable and committable state at the start of a mission, when the mission is called for at ...

, and error rate; others include

durability Durability is the ability of a physical product to remain functional, without requiring excessive maintenance or repair, when faced with the challenges of normal operation over its design lifetime. There are several measures of durability in us ...

(in storage systems), end-to-end latency (for complex data processing systems, especially pipelines), and correctness.

References

IT service management Outsourcing {{management-stub