A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contract between a service provider and a customer that defines the types and standards of services to be offered. It functions as a documented understanding between the entity providing the service and the one receiving the benefits of the service. Although traditional SLAs define service expectations between vendors and customers, they may also be employed between departments within the same organization. SLAs are designed to keep both parties honest and act as vital documentation detailing all the metrics, responsibilities, and expectations that were originally agreed upon. Both parties have access to the SLA, which means that neither may claim that they were unaware of expectations or agreed-upon standards after the fact.

In ServiceNow, SLA is a feature of Service Level Management (SLM) application. It is used to define a specific set of criteria that would result in an SLA being generated with parameters like Table, Duration, Schedule, Conditions, etc. . There are different types of SLAs in ServiceNow, including customer-based SLAs, service-based SLAs, and multi-level SLAs. Customer-based SLAs are used for individual customers and comprise all relevant services that a client may need, while service-based SLAs include one identical type of service for all of its customers.

SLAs are widely used in incident management and in catalog item tasks. They define the level of service a customer can expect from a vendor or a supplier and are used to measure the task fulfillment in terms of service, responsibilities, quality, time taken, etc. . The task_sla table stores the task SLA records. To create an SLA in ServiceNow, one can navigate to the SLA definition, which is used to create SLAs.