Service Level Management
The goal for Service Level Management is to maintain and gradually improve IT Service quality, by defining, measuring and reporting upon a set of quality targets or Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between (internal or external) IT provider and IT customer. As such, Service Level Management for IT is not unlike Six Sigma continuous improvement for manufacturing.
Most companies today have implemented some SLAs to manage the relationship between IT provider and IT customer. The biggest problem is to find an effective way to measure and monitor pre-SLA achievements and to verify that targets are achievable before committing to them. Also, if SLAs are not focused and precise, then they may fall into disuse or even disrepute.
While Service Unavailability and Mean Time Between Failure are popular SLA measures, these measures alone are not sufficient to measure customer satisfaction. Other indicators such as throughput activity, traffic volume and transaction response times are needed as well.
A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for Service Level Management is “coverage” or the percentage of services that are covered by SLAs. Commercial SLA monitoring tools exist, but most have a narrow and specific focus: one tool can monitor performance of web-based applications, while another focuses on e-mail or firewalls. Legacy and homegrown applications are notoriously difficult to integrate into commercial SLA tools and it is fair to say to that there is not a single product that can measure everything.
Log Intelligence can help to establish a baseline of pre-SLA performance and then use the same measures to identify post-SLA improvements. Simple and precise measurements can be derived for practically any service or system. All IT systems have some logs and, at a minimum, report on errors and reboots. Frequently, more granular records are available such a record for each successful or failed transaction, which a Log Intelligence solutions can use to compile statistics on the number of transactions processed.
Log Intelligence can provide a simple, accurate way to measure a variety of performance indicators that go beyond unavailability and Mean Time Between Failure, for all IT Services. Log data is natively available for all applications and do not require the installation of additional software on the application.