Service Level Agreements: A Determinant of the Success of the Vendor-Client Partnership

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are an important aspect in business engagements. A Service Level Agreement sets the parameters for deliverables, priorities, responsibilities and guarantees/warranties. IT Buyers seek vendors who make SLAs with clearly defined terms and conditions and a roadmap to achieve the desired goals of their project. An experienced IT company seeking to outsource any part of its final project deliverables would prefer to enter into a SLA (also known as contracted delivery performance) with the outsourcing company. It includes setting, tracking and managing SLAs which is an important part of Outsourcing Relationship Management (ORM) discipline.

SLAs are especially useful in the IT service industry, in which the clients are worried about softwares providing mission-critical services to their business. A single malfunction in IT operations can severely damage the working structure of the business. It is hence vital that the IT service provider has a defined set of rules and strict regulation to ensure that the promised IT services will be delivered. A Service Level Agreement can provide the network administrator with complete details on application availability and is a great tool to application monitoring and performance testing. This also smoothens the business service management process.

An Ideal Service Level Agreement

SLAs are usually scripted keeping in mind the client’s requirement, and essentially differ for each project. However, an ideal SLA has to cover some important aspects like:

• Definition of the services being promised
• How the services will be delivered
• Measurement criteria of services delivered
• Quality standards of the services promised
• Action to be taken if the provider fails to deliver as promised

Advantages of Having a SLA

A Service Level Agreement is applicable to both the vendor and the client. Some of the important advantages of having a SLA are as follows:

• Documented evidence of the agreement
• Sets a framework for quality expectation and implementation
• Makes the rules clear in case of a disagreement between vendor and client
• Makes goals and methodology crystal clear
• Creates a standard in the level of service
• Becomes a basis for improvisation of services

4 Critical Requisites of Application Performance Management Solution

When a business’s crucial aspects are being handled by applications, they need some sort of application performance management system. There is a huge data bank of the types of performance management tools available on the internet, which can be very confusing. The following are four critical requisites of an application performance management solution:

END USER MONITORING CAPABILITY

End user monitoring tools enable you to judge how your applications are performing. There are many network appliances which aid in web application monitoring and management, giving a plug and play solution with no installation required on the desktop. In case the end user monitoring tools show latencies, your APM solution needs to know how to connect the latencies your users are facing and the problem which is causing the latency in your data center. The performance management tool should also be within your budget.

AID IN DATA CENTER MANAGEMENT

Useful application performance management can be done only through the performance monitoring solutions which provide data center management. Today’s applications are complex, scattered and interdependent, and hence need data center management. The entire data center is to be taken into consideration if the application performance monitoring system has to solve the problem. But as data center management tools utilize information collected from server management softwares installed on various tiers, there is collection of a lot of resource consumption metrics that will not connect your performance to what the end user faces. If you don’t monitor end users, you will not know of problems with the application unless the end user calls up your help desk. End user monitoring and performance testing is hence very important.

NETWORK PERFORMANCE MONITORING

An application is useless without the network that is supporting it. Network performance monitoring also plays an important role in application performance management. If the latencies shown within your application server do not match that of the end user, the application performance monitoring tool will not work efficiently. The application performance management tool will be effective by integrating network performance monitoring.

BUSINESS TRANSACTION MANAGEMENT

An APM solution can cover all the important issues mentioned above only if it monitors each transaction from the end user, through the network till the data center. This is called Business Transaction Management or BTM.