Actual and business elapsed times
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- UpdatedJan 30, 2025
- 2 minutes to read
- Yokohama
- Service Level Management
Task SLA records contain two sets of timing information: Actual elapsed and Business elapsed.
The difference between these two sets of timing is vital when you create and report on SLA definitions.
- Actual elapsed values are calculated on a 24x7 basis.
- Business elapsed values are calculated based on the schedule
specified in the task SLA. The schedule is taken from the SLA definition by
default.Note: If no schedule is specified, then the Business elapsed time is the same as the Actual elapsed time. This can be disabled by changing the com.snc.sla.always_populate_business_fields property to false in the SLA Engine. When this property is set to false, the Business fields will be 0 or empty.
Elapsed times and schedules
Consider a scenario where an SLA has a defined schedule of 9 am to 5 pm on weekdays. With this schedule, the difference between actual and business elapsed times can be significant.
For example, if a task SLA starts at 2 pm on a weekday, its business elapsed time at 9 am on the next weekday is 3 hours while its actual elapsed time is 19 hours.

In addition, if a schedule defines an 8 hour working day, then 24 hours or one day in business elapsed time equates to 3 days in actual elapsed time.

Example
For example, an incident is opened on Friday, December 12 at 9 pm, outside of the SLA schedule of 8 am to 5 pm on weekdays.
- Business elapsed time is 1 hour and 30 minutes because the SLA business timer stopped at 5 pm on Friday and restarted at 8 am on Monday.
- Actual elapsed time is 60 hours and 30 minutes, representing the real time between the incident being opened and the current time.