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W O R K S H O P

How SLAs Are Used

March 21, 2003
By Jon Saperia

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Watching the Watchers

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Details, Details
	Watching the Watchers
	Integrated Service Management
	Survey By the Numbers

"Most Valuable Monitors and Measurements" shows what enterprises value in regard to monitoring. Check to see if your approach provides you with these types of data. All these measures, including service-usage reporting, real-time threshold monitoring and real-time monitoring by application type, help validate that the service has, in a concrete way, measured up to the SLA.

Many enterprises do not yet take these kinds of measurements, whether they use over-provisioning to guarantee good service or one of the many technologies that control services on shared resources. It is still common for internal IT organizations to get much of their information from non-real-time user feedback. While this qualitative input is critical, augmenting that user information with real-time quantitative data will put you in a much better position to defend your budget and will provide real leverage with your service providers. Make sure you ask them for this type of data when you negotiate your next SLA.

Quantitative input adds additional value: It can be used to more intelligently perform capacity planning, resource allocation, and server and network redesign, all of which can be costly and without significant benefit if attempted without real data.

Get the 411

Management SLA Information Wanted & Provided

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What are the building blocks of successful SLA management? If you want to report service outages and monitor real-time traffic, you must get, for most services, some specific information from the network to back up claims of conformance or non-conformance. There are no global standards as yet that we can apply to say that most of the high-level services are running or have run properly. For the most part, these are defined locally.

Some of the metrics are latency, packet loss, mean time to repair, mean time between failures, uptime, sometimes called availability, and transaction response time. By combining these in different ways, it may be possible for you to write into your SLAs enough metrics so that you'll know when agreements have not been met. But even though these metrics can be of value, many people are still not able to get them from their service providers. And many internal IT departments cannot provide them on a per-service basis.

"Management SLA Information Wanted and Provided" shows information that can be used to verify the performance of a service and what percentage of users can actually get this from their service providers versus those still just wishing.