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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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Integrated Service Management

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

So if all this quantitative data is so useful for so many important tasks, and given the value we see in good measures, why is it that so few of us have it? Only slightly more than one third of those responding to our survey got even the most basic measure of packet loss, while 25 percent lacked uptime stats.

There are a number of potential explanations. The most cogent seems to be that we do not have an integrated set of tools available in our networks that can provision and then monitor services and the agreements that we make to provide these services. What we have is a patchwork of individual tools for configuration; performance monitoring; fault management; root-cause analysis; security, for example, intrusion detection; and performance reporting. As we found in "Network Management on $1.19 per Day", the low-hanging fault and performance fruit are about all you can expect without a six-figure investment. This non-integrated array of systems is a core obstacle to effective network and services management.

If integrated tools are so important to service management, why don't we have them? It's not that the user community has not complained about their absence. Because internal IT departments are under increasing pressure to reduce costs and deliver high-quality, reliable services, providers are being driven by their customers to provide effective service-level guarantees--and the wherewithal to back them up.

Living With SLAs

Don't despair--things are not as bleak as they might sound. There are things that we can do to maximize the SLAs we make with our providers as well as those we make with our internal clients.

Most Valuable Monitors and Measurements

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• Don't hesitate to put SLAs in place, despite their shortcomings. Just be sure that the SLA is written with enough precision so that you can get an accurate reading of the state of the SLA at any point in time, even if the snapshot is not as focused as you would like.

• Keep SLAs and your network as simple as possible--just because you can gather a lot of data doesn't mean that you should. There's a real cost associated with collecting and analyzing network data. If you have a high-value service that must stay up and offer good performance, do what many others have done: Rather than introducing new technology, devote hardware and bandwidth resources to it. Then, as management software improves, migrate to network infrastructures that allow services to share resources while at the same time maintaining the reliability and performance characteristics they need.

• Write your SLAs with specific metrics, and define how they are to be measured. Even if you express performance as latency experienced at point A or B, that may not be precise enough. You want to be sure you understand the measurement approach and are getting a closer feel for what the users are experiencing.

• Pressure your service providers and vendors for better management tools. Ultimately, a new generation of management software is needed, but for now, turning up the heat can bring incremental improvements.

Jon Saperia, co-chair of the IETF SNMP Configuration Working Group, is co-author of several recent Internet drafts in the area of policy and configuration management. He is also founder of JDS Consulting and author of a recent book on services and service management, SNMP at the Edge: Building Effective Service Management Systems. Write to him at saperia@jdscons.com.

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