Service Level Management: Monitor
Immediately once the SLA targets have been set, ongoing monitoring must start and periodic service achievement reports must be generated. The ITSM Service Level Management process recommends that operational reports must be generated at least daily and ideally real-time alerts should be triggered when SLAs are violated or threatened. In addition, periodic reports must be circulated to customers and IT managers with details of SLA performance and violations.
The service support desk should be notified immediately when SLAs are violated or threatened. Automated Log Intelligence can trigger alerts automatically based on preconfigured thresholds. A baseline of normal behavior can also be established automatically. Pro-active alerts can be generated when the number of log messages received is unusually high or low or when pre-determined ratios, such as unsuccessful/successful logins are unusual. An unusually low transaction (log message) rate can be a reliable early indicator that the service is degrading and may become unavailable in the near future. Such baseline alerts are particularly useful for legacy and homegrown applications, for which no other real-time SLA monitoring tools exist.