the organization and also across multiple locations of the organization. This internal scripting of SLA also helps to compare the quality of service between an in-house department and an external service provider. The output received by the customer as a result of the service provided is the main focus of the service level agreement. Service level agreements are also defined at different levels: Customer-based SLA: An agreement with an individual customer group, covering all the services they use. For example, an SLA between a supplier (IT service provider) and the finance department of a large organization for the services such as finance system, payroll system, billing system, procurement/purchase system, etc. Service-based SLA: An agreement for all customers using the services being delivered by the service provider. For example: A mobile service provider offers a routine service to all the customers and offers certain maintenance as a part of an offer with the universal charging. An email system for the entire organization. There are chances of difficulties arising in this type of SLA as level of the services being offered may vary for different customers (for example, head office staff may use high-speed LAN connections while local offices may have to use a lower speed leased line). Multilevel SLA: The SLA is split into the different levels, each addressing different set of customers for the same services, in the same SLA. Corporate-level SLA: Covering all the generic service level management (often abbreviated as SLM) issues appropriate to every customer throughout the organization. These issues are likely to be less volatile and so updates (SLA reviews) are less frequently required. Customer-level SLA: covering all SLM issues relevant to the particular customer group, regardless of the services being used. Service-level SLA: covering all SLM issue relevant to the specific services, in relation to this specific customer group. Components A well-defined and typical SLA will contain the following components: Type of service to be provided: It specifies the type of service and any additional details of the type of service to be provided. In the case of an IP network connectivity, the type of service will describe functions such as operation and maintenance of networking equipment, connection bandwidth to be provided, etc. The service's desired performance level, especially its reliability and responsiveness: A reliable service will be the one that suffers minimum disruption in a specific amount of time and is available at almost