Often when we talk with IT managers about Service Level Agreements, or SLAs, their first reaction is “I don’t have any use for SLAs because I don’t have any formal Service Level Contracts.” But we believe every IT organization can utilize SLAs, and in times like these when everyone’s budget is stretched to the limit, SLAs can make a big difference in how - and how well - you manage your mission critical applications.

Traditionally people tend to think about SLAs as measuring the availability of discrete services - can I ping this server, is this web site up or down. Today, with IT organizations now focused on delivering business services, it’s important to view performance and availability from a higher level. Whether the underlying cause is the network, a server, a router, a database, or a web site, you need to know what business activity is compromised so you can respond appropriately and focus on what’s most important to your company’s business. Furthermore, nowadays most IT organizations need to be able to report to management on performance from a business perspective.

Longitude does this using Service Level Agreements. A Longitude SLA allows you to group together all the disparate components that underlie your critical business processes. Longitude then monitors for degradations in performance or availability of each business service as a whole.

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. If any single component is down or operating out of acceptable tolerance, it is reflected in the status of the overall SLA. Longitude can then report and alert - in real time or historically - exactly what was out of compliance, for how long, and how severely. This helps you provide better service in several ways:

• First, because it incorporates all of the components that support the business service, Longitude eliminates finger-pointing and cuts resolution time by showing you exactly what is causing the problem.
• Second, by allowing you to specify degraded as well as unacceptable levels of performance for each component, Longitude can alert you early, before end users are apt to notice there’s a problem.
• Third, by allowing you to drill down into underlying issues, Longitude puts actionable information right at your fingertips.
• Finally, by allowing you to annotate SLAs with information about outages and remedies taken (see blue pin in SLA Dashboard), Longitude also provides the foundation for more meaningful management reporting.

For more information on Service Level Agreements, download our white paper, “The Best Practices Guide to Developing and Monitoring SLAs.”