They also provide a way to evaluate vendor and carrier performance. For instance, if the organization has aggressive availability and performance targets, it will be important to prevent problems from occurring and to fix problems quickly when they occur. A discussion of what improvements are needed based on the current set of metrics. For instance, the maximum response time will be very different for a round-trip ping than for hitting the Enter key at a remote location for a specific application. If we factor in potential non-availability due to user or process error and assume that non-availability is 4X availability due to technical factors, we could assume that the availability budget is 99.95 percent. Create application profiles any time you introduce new applications to the network. In this e-book, we’ll look at four areas where metrics are vital to enterprise IT. Organizations that implement proactive service level definitions or agreements do so because of business requirements and potential availability risk. You need a top-down priority commitment to service, resulting in a complete understanding of customer needs and perceptions. They establish the timeline customers should expect when contacting your support staff. Determine the parties involved in the SLA. Many organizations set up a flag in help desk software to identify proactive cases versus reactive cases for this purpose. On-hold is meant to ensure service level agreements deadlines aren’t missed while awaiting a response. Joe can be reached via email at joe@joehertvik.com, or on his web site at joehertvik.com. For example, a customer might insist his application is the most critical within the corporation when in reality the cost of downtime for that application is significantly less than others in terms of lost revenue, lost productivity, and lost customer goodwill. A network analyst and an application or server support application should create the application profile. Application profiles help the networking organization understand and define network service level requirements for individual applications. If you’re providing support for an organization with many different locations or divisions, be careful creating SLAs that cover multiple locations. The service may be over-engineered, which leads to over-spending, or under-engineered, which leads to unmet business objectives. All rights reserved. This method tabulates the number of users that have been affected by an outage and multiplies it by the number of minutes of the outage. User groups may also be present when SLAs are involved. The following table shows a simple service level definition for application performance. Networked application or service SLAs may have additional needs based on user group requirements and business criticality. In general, service response definitions require a tiered support structure coupled with a help desk software support system to track problems via trouble tickets. A much better service level would have used the hours the customer worked and/or his or her business is open, and m… An example of a simple solution matrix for an enterprise manufacturing company may look something like the following table. Measuring the service level determines whether the organization is meeting objectives and also identifies the root cause of availability or performance issues. It will not be considered a service level miss if a new user request has been received but management is slow in approving the new user. Simply put, an SLA defines what the IT service provider and the customer should expect when contracting for a service. The networking group was then viewed as having higher professionalism, expertise, and an overall asset to the organization. You want to increase your productivity, efficiency, performance, flexibility, capacity, and standardization. These may be classified as gold, silver, and bronze service standards within one geographic or service area. The example shows an enterprise organization that may have different notification and response requirements based on the time of day and area of the network. The organization must also define a service that can quickly identify and resolve potential service issues that will impact availability and performance if ignored. Performance indicator metrics, including availability, performance, service response time by priority, time to resolve by priority, and other measurable SLA parameters. As a result, after considering lowering the current service goals, the organization budgeted for additional resources needed to achieve the desired service level. The distribution for the non-availability is also fairly wide, meaning that customers could experience either significant non-availability or availability close to a general deployment release. Network organizations have historically met expanding network requirements by building solid network infrastructures and working reactively to handle individual service issues. The following quick wins can add immediate value without implementing an entire process. It is a good idea to measure the amount of proactive cases in each area as well. The second reason involves balancing the amount of proactive management that can be done with existing or newly-defined resources. You can also obtain performance using this method. When problem severity has been defined, define or investigate the support process to create service response definitions. Only a small percentage of network organizations have service level definitions in these areas. The last step in creating the SLA is final negotiation and sign-off. Primary service/support SLAs will normally have many components, including the level of support, how it will be measured, the escalation path for SLA reconciliation, and overall budget concerns. Make coordination a two-sided effort. For example, you might have an availability level of 99.999 percent, or 5 minutes of downtime per year. Determining the Final Availability Budget. Another measure of service level management success is the service level management review. Whenever possible, discover the customer’s desired outcome for the SLA and write the SLA to that outcome. service level definitions for individual applications are important if QoS is configured for key applications and other traffic is considered optional. More sophisticated network organizations have attempted to resolve this issue by simply creating goals for the percentage of problems that are proactively identified, as opposed to problems reactively identified by user problem report or complaint. For the purpose of an availability budget, power will be used because it is the leading cause of non-availability in this area. Given this, here are six best practices for creating and fulfilling IT service SLAs in an IT service management (ITSM) environment. Another service indicator may be that the organization states service or support satisfaction as a corporate goal. Ensure you create thresholds that are meaningful and useful in preventing network problems or availability issues. Standardize these tasks and record them in a service catalogue. These SLAs manage the numbers, but lack context for the customer’s desired outcomes. These metrics may require management influence to consistently enter problems in the database and update problems in real time. Network design is another major contributor to availability. The practice of Service Level Management (SLM) gives assurance to the service consumer that a provider will deliver a level of service that meets their needs. These thresholds may then apply to all three performance and capacity management processes in some way. Download Now: ITIL Best Practice e-Books. In these cases, it would not be uncommon to create different service level standards based on individual service requirements. Capacity and performance service level definitions can be broken down into several categories: network links, network devices, end-to-end performance, and application performance. Tuning SLAs helps achieve that balanced optimal level. The site would have two routers configured so that if any T1 or router failed the site would not experience an outage. SLA best practices Once you’ve brokered the best SLAs for your current business and customer needs, you’re ready to implement them. The following table defines service level definitions for device capacity and performance thresholds. Service Level management performance indicators are therefore a primary requirement for service level management because they provide the means to fully understand existing service levels and to make adjustments based on current issues. Deciding how many people and which tools to use without SLAs is often a budgetary guess. Best Practices in Service-Level Management Published: 02 November 1998 ID: G0074018 Analyst(s): Mike Rhone, Tammy Kirk Summary SLAs must focus on local business requirements, or risk end users developing alternative resources at each site. SLAs are a collection of promises the service provider... 2. For this reason, service level management is highly recommended in any network planning and design phase and should start with any newly defined network architecture. To qualify as a critical success factor, a process or process step must improve the quality of the SLA and benefit network availability in general. A service level agreement is created to describe the quality of service a customer or end user can expect from a service provider. This then helps distinguish between network problems and application or server problems. Then start prioritizing the goals or lowering expectations that can still meet business requirements. Technical goals include availability levels, throughput, jitter, delay, response time, scalability requirements, new feature introductions, new application introductions, security, manageability, and even cost. As an example, your SLA may guarantee 99.9% uptime for telecommunication lines. You must know the number of devices that can fail and cause switchover in the redundant path, the MTBF of those devices, and the switchover time. Make sure that user groups understand that additional levels of service will cost more and let them make the decision if it is a critical business requirement. This is the last step toward basic service level management; it defines the reactive and proactive processes and network management capabilities that you implement to achieve service level goals. If large numbers of high severity problems are not accounted for in the availability budget, the organization can then work to understand the source of these problems and a potential remedy. Enterprise organizations with higher-availability requirements may need technical assistance during the SLA process to help with such issues as availability budgeting, performance limitations, application profiling, or proactive management capabilities. The service definition for proactive secondary goals defines how the organization provides proactive support, including the identification of network down, link-down or device-down conditions, network error conditions, and network capacity thresholds. These individuals communicate SLA issues to their respective workgroups. Whenever an IT service is designed or changed, its accompanying SLA should also be reviewed and modified to make sure it is fair, enforceable, and realistic. Note: The support structure, escalation path, help-desk procedures, measurement, and priority definitions should largely remain the same to maintain and improve a consistent service culture. This is also attractive because organizations usually have different service level goals for different geographic or business-critical areas of the network. Developing a service level definition starts with a general understanding of how these problem conditions will be detected, who will look at them, and what will happen when they occur. SLAs establish two-way accountability for service, meaning that users and application groups are also accountable for the network service. After you define the service areas and service parameters, use the information from previous steps to build a matrix of service standards. When an outage occurred, the organization would build new processes, management capabilities, or infrastructure that to prevent a particular outage from occurring again. The operations group must be prepared for this initial flood of issues and additional short-term resources to fix or resolve these previously undetected conditions. The ServiceNow® Service Level Management (SLM) application helps to gather service requirements as well as monitor and report with regards to agreed service levels (SLAs). However, due to a higher change rate and increasing availability requirements, we now need an improved model to proactively prevent unplanned downtime and quickly repair the network. The service level definition may also include a process for modifying results to help improve accuracy and to prevent improper adjustments. When looking at service and support metrics, representatives of the organization found that hardware replacement was taking approximately 24 hours, much longer than the original estimate because the organization had budgeted only four. This section contains examples for reactive service definitions and proactive service definitions to consider for many service-provider and enterprise organizations. You may also need additional work in the following areas to ensure success: A clear understanding of application performance requirements, In-depth technical investigation on threshold values that make sense for the organization based on business requirements and overall costs, Budgetary cycle and out-of-cycle upgrade requirements, Priority and criticality of the network management information balanced with the amount of proactive work that the operations group can effectively handle, Training requirements to ensure that support staff understand the messages or alerts and can effectively deal with the defined condition, Event correlation methodologies or processes to ensure that multiple trouble tickets are not generated for the same root-cause problem, Documentation on specific messages or alerts that helps with event identification at the tier 1 support level. A network life-cycle assessment is available from Cisco NSA high-availability services (HAS) services showing current network availability constraints associated with network life-cycle practices. The first category of proactive service level definitions is network errors. This allows the organization to react faster to service problems and to more easily understand issues that impact service or the cost of down time in its environment. Organizations with a variety of versions are expected to have slightly lower availability because of added complexity, interoperability, and increased troubleshooting times. Link constraints may include link redundancy and diversity, media limitations, wiring infrastructures, local-loop connectivity, and long-distance connectivity. Monthly networking service-level review meeting to review service-level compliance and implement improvements. When expressed as a percentage of total minutes in the time period, this can be easily converted to availability. If possible, we recommend that the parties responsible for measurement and the parties responsible for results be different to prevent a conflict of interest. The ITIL strategy section talks about how crucial it is to understand your … We recommend the following steps for building and supporting a service-level model: Create application profiles detailing network characteristics of critical applications. The network organization must listen closely to these business requirements and develop specialized solutions that fit into the overall support structure. Many Cisco devices will simply shut down when they are considerably out of specification rather than risking damage to all hardware. The first area to investigate is potential hardware failure and the effect on unavailability. Develop > Processes and Best Practices > Service Level Management Overview > Key performance indicators for Service Level Management. New phones will be ordered and delivered within one week of request. The SLA developer should also understand the business goals and growth of the organization in order to accommodate network upgrades, workload, and budgeting. One goal of the network SLA should be agreement on one overall format that accommodates different service levels. The next area for investigation is software failures. Within each of these areas, you must understand network management functionality such as performance management, configuration management, fault management, and security. Although power failures are an important aspect of determining network availability, this discussion is limited because theoretical power analysis cannot be accurately done. Define availability and performance standards and define common terms. If switchover time is not acceptable, then you must add it to the calculations. If you use the availability level of 99.95 percent, this works out to be equal to 525600 - (99.95 X 5256), or 262.8 minutes of downtime. Service level management is the discipline of using proactive methodology and procedures to ensure that adequate levels of service are delivered to all IT users in accordance with business priorities and at an acceptable cost. See the following table: In addition to service response and service resolution, build a matrix for escalation. If you choose to create and measure application performance, it is probably best if you do not measure performance to the server itself. This also helps focus network management tools/information on resolving problems proactively rather than helping with the root cause. Unfortunately, many applications have significant constraints that require careful management. The next table shows how an organization may wish to measure proactive support capabilities and proactive support overall. In either case, it can also be helpful to identify and measure the root cause of down time so that improvement can be more easily targeted. If the number is unacceptable, then budget additional resources to gain the desired levels. This e-book introduces metrics in enterprise IT. A simple example would be a MTBF of 35,433 hours for each of two redundant identical devices and a switchover time of 30 seconds. Another example may be the raw speed that data can traverse on terrestrial links, which is approximately 100 miles per millisecond. A Practical Approach to Implementing Service Level Management Page 8 of 9 SERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT KEY ACTIVITIES & QUICK WINS Most organizations have the ability to identify and implement some quick wins associated with Service Level Management key activities. This helps the organization prioritize network improvement initiatives and determine how easily the constraint can be addressed. Many carrier networks have already performed an availability budget on their systems, but getting this information may be difficult. The service definition simply states how the operations group will proactively identify and respond to network or link down conditions in different areas of the network. Network technology, resiliency, and configuration constraints are any limitations or risks associated with the current technology, hardware, links, design, or configuration. This scenario works well when the organization is building basic reactive support SLAs. Specifically, the organization should define and build a service that consistently and quickly identifies and resolves problems within times allocated by the availability model. In some cases, upper management will create these SLAs at very high-availability or high-performance levels to promote their service and to provide internal goals for internal employees. The best way to start analyzing technical goals and constraints is to brainstorm or research technical goals and requirements. Overall, metrics are simply a tool that allows network managers to manage service level consistency and to make improvements according to business requirements. The service level definition simply defines performance and capacity exception thresholds and average thresholds that will initiate investigation or upgrade. By understanding the needs of the various business groups, the initial SLA document will be much closer to the business requirement and desired result. You typically review these on a monthly basis to ensure that service-level definitions or SLAs are working well. This information is normally used for capacity planning and trending, but can also be used to understand service-level issues. In these cases, a set budget is allocated to the network, which may overreact to current needs or grossly underestimate the requirement, resulting in failure. What an organization must evaluate is an approximate measurement of power availability to its devices based on experience in its geographic area, power backup capabilities, and process implemented to ensure consistent quality power to all devices. The organization does not use VoIP and does not wish to factor in software switchover time. The goal in building the service level definitions is to create a service that will meet the availability and performance goals. Measuring SLA conformance and reporting results are important aspects of the SLA process that help to ensure long-term consistency and results. See Implementing Service-level Management for more details. These may be defined for different areas of the network or specific applications. All orders will be released within one hour of receipt, except for Sundays between 1:00 AM and 4:00 AM when system maintenance occurs. 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