July 22, 2008

SLAs (Service Level Agreements) often call to mind images of historical reporting and compliance - essentially documenting performance (or problems with it) after the fact. While that’s part of the picture, it causes many IT organizations without formal reporting requirements to overlook their benefit in proactive monitoring. So if you think you don’t need SLAs, think again.

Traditionally, Service Level Agreements ( also called SLAs) have been used to measure the availability of specific services, and report on the percentage of time a given service is up or down. Longitude builds on this concept by allowing you to define Service Level Agreements to track anything from a simple up/down status to the overall health of an entire multi-tiered application. For example, if a mission critical application depends on the availability and performance of a web server, application server, back end database, network connectivity and bandwidth, Longitude enables you to define a service level agreement that represents the convergence of all the underlying operational components.

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