Ensuring top-notch service delivery to end users is vital for every organization to produce world-class products and establish a successful business empire. No matter how big or small the organization is, setting up quality service expectations and bringing them into reality within the minimal delivery time limit is the key to thrive in today’s hyper-competitive market. But how do you guarantee that the services you provide are meeting the quality expectations of your customers? That’s where a proactive SLA monitoring solution becomes a necessity.
What is SLA monitoring?
Service-level agreement (SLA) is a contract agreement between the service provider and its end users that documents what services the provider will furnish and defines the service standards the provider is obligated to meet. It ensures the services that were promised by the service provider to the end users are fulfilled within a specified time frame.
SLA monitoring is the process of tracking and monitoring the performance of the services that are offered to the end users/customers per the promised service expectations by the service provider. From an IT infrastructure perspective, this would indicate tracking the performance of your business’ servers and applications in your IT environment and ensuring proper delivery of services to the end-users/customers that rely on them for their business needs. It aims to improve customer satisfaction by detecting any potential bottlenecks that might affect service quality, such as network outages, slow response times, or faults, to help you take appropriate decisions on resolving them instantly, resulting in cost saving, and increased revenue.
The need for SLA monitoring software in business
Let’s say you are an internet banking company that provides online banking services to your customers all across the globe. Typically, your IT infrastructure would include banking applications, web servers, database servers, cloud platforms, and network devices that play a major role in the smooth functioning of your banking application to end users. Since your banking application would be used 24/7 by world-wide customers, it is important to ensure high availability and seamless performance of your service to your customers.To achieve this, you prepare an SLA with your customers during onboarding that defines the services you will be providing them and promises the quality of service that will be delivered whenever they’re using your application.
From an IT infrastructure standpoint, it is evident that you need an SLA that specifies the expected performance and quality of service you’ll be providing your customers that are using your application, which includes parameters such as response time, availability, uptime, error rate, security, and more. To ensure that you meet your SLA requirements, it is of utmost importance to proactively monitor your IT infrastructure, and at the same time, ensure your SLAs are met consistently to deliver a satisfying, reliable, and a smooth service to your customers. That’s where SLA monitoring tools like ManageEngine Applications Manager comes in handy to help you ensure quality service delivery and high customer satisfaction.
Using Applications Manager to monitor SLAs
Applications Manager’s SLA monitoring capabilities makes it easier for you to obtain a holistic view into the performance of your business service overall, aids you to ensure seamless delivery of services to your customers, and resolves any issues that impact service quality. In case of IT infrastructure, Applications Manager’s SLA monitor helps you to track the performance and availability of your infrastructure resources to ensure proper SLAs are met and triggers instant alerts whenever any anomalies are encountered, facilitating you to minimize possible service disruptions, reduce the recovery time, and save the cost of troubleshooting.
Key metrics to track in SLA monitor
Applications Manager’s SLA monitoring tool helps you to deliver seamless quality of service to customers and ensures smooth business continuity by tracking and reporting on the key metrics that affect your service quality and performance. The following are the key metrics that need to be checked while monitoring your SLAs:
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Availability/Uptime: The percentage level of functionality and accessibility of a service for end users in a business system. It determines whether a system resource is available and in working condition so that proper service delivery is ensured to the end users in a business application. Applications Manager’s SLA monitor allows you to track the overall availability percentage of your business applications/servers in your IT infrastructure. It provides detailed statistics on the performance of individual resources running in your business application, enabling you to identify and resolve issues promptly before they impact end users.
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Response Time: The amount of time taken by your service to respond to the requests from the end user in a business system. This metric ensures your service can handle and deliver optimal performance to end users interacting with your application in a swift and consistent manner. Applications Manager’s SLA monitoring tool monitors the response time of your system resources running in your business application by accessing the performance dashboard of individual system resources and allows you to trigger instant alerts in case of slow response times to take corrective actions right on time, ensure enhanced user experience and customer satisfaction.
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Compliance: The degree to which the infrastructure components comprising your business applications/servers and the volume of failed events meet the promised contractual obligations to ensure seamless delivery of service to end users. In simple terms, this indicates whether your business infrastructure has followed the required standards and rules for the smooth functioning of your business system. SLA monitoring tools like Applications Manager make it a priority to follow rules and standards for your infrastructure components by defining SLA rules based on the amount of availability and error events that are required to be maintained for your business applications/servers to ensure smooth functioning of your business services to your customers.
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Errors events: The number of failure events/errors that have occurred within a specific time frame in a system. It is the number of times the system resources have failed to deliver the required service, causing performance disruptions in the overall end-user experience. Applications Manager helps you keep a constant check on the number of error events that have occurred in your business application by tracking the event volume across various time ranges, starting from today, yesterday, this week, etc., all the way up to the previous year. You can view detailed stats on the alarm occurrences that have occurred for your business applications/servers based on the severity status, enabling you to take necessary steps to resolve faults quickly to ensure high reliability and functionality of your service to end users.
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Downtime: The total amount of time for which the service is down/under scheduled maintenance in a business system. This metric gives you an overall idea of how often your service is subject to downtime and tracking this is important to ensure long-term business continuity. Applications Manager gives you a clear picture of the total downtime experienced by your business applications/servers with complete insights on the downtime of individual resources that are present under it. It provides detailed stats on the amount of downtime experienced due to unavailability/scheduled maintenance of resources, enabling you to gauge on the performance of your system resources in the long run.
Applications Manager’s SLA monitoring software also tracks other key metrics that are vital to perform proper SLA monitoring of your business applications/servers in your IT infrastructure. You can view the total mean time to repair (MTTR) and mean time between failure (MTBF) taken which gives you quick insights on the amount of time taken to recover from a system failure, enabling you to take informed decisions on resource allocation and system planning, if any.
In addition, you can generate necessary reports on the SLA statistics of your business applications/servers based on the custom time periods of your choice and schedule them to be sent in the form of periodic mail notifications so that IT administrators find it easy to keep constant track of their business infrastructure status.
ManageEngine Applications Manager has been a part of the industry for more than 20 years now and goes beyond just monitoring SLAs. It offers APM, infrastructure monitoring, and end-user experience monitoring from a single console. You can try this robust solution by downloading a 30-day free trial or schedule a free personalized demo with our experts to gain more knowledge about monitoring with Applications Manager.
