Manage SLAs More Effectively by Predictively Aligning IT Performance and Service Levels

How to Avoid Penalties, Improve Performance, and Increase Your Agility

Contents
Executive Summary ............................................................................................................ 1 Challenges of Service Level Management .......................................................................... 1 The Dynamic Way to Manage SLAs: UC4 Service Level Governor...................................... 2 The New Generation of Service Level Management ........................................................ 2 Business Improvements .................................................................................................. 2 Examining Scenarios To Make the Best Choice............................................................... 2 UC4 Service Level GovernorSolution Details ................................................................... 3 Proactive SLA Management ............................................................................................ 3 Real-time Dashboard for SLA Monitoring......................................................................... 4 Advanced Analytics and Reporting .................................................................................. 5 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 6

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Executive Summary
Todays enterprise IT environments are rapidly growing in size and complexity. With IT departments often handling a combination of legacy systems, in-house applications, Web services, virtual machines, and cloud environments, staying on top of service level agreements (SLAs) has become increasingly difficult and time-consuming. And, despite all the effort that goes into managing SLAs, violationsand costly penaltiesstill occur far too often. Staying responsive to changing market dynamics and customer demands while also ensuring that SLAs are met requires a degree of IT flexibility that is possible only with extensive automation. Such automation must be able not only to manage known processes and events, but also to rapidly address unexpected issues before they result in SLA violations. Thats because, unlike traditional legacy applications, whose processes are usually defined weeks in advance, many new processesespecially Web-based ones cannot be predicted in detail based on past history. As a result, the ability to detect emerging patterns in real time and respond rapidly to changing conditions requires an intelligent automation platform. The UC4 Service Level Governor solution offers both automation and intelligence. Incorporating real-time monitoring of service levels, insight into end-to-end business and IT processes, and intelligent decision making, it enables you to predictively manage your IT infrastructure so as to optimize both performance and service delivery. With UC4 Service Level Governor, you can avoid costly SLA violations; consider different options based on resources, violation severity, and direct and indirect costs; manage the delivery of SLA alerts; and stay on top of it all with real-time SLA management and reporting dashboards. In short, the solution will enable you to automatically meet your SLA commitments while also giving you the agility you need to succeed in todays global, real-time business environment.

Challenges of Service Level Management

In the past, defining and managing SLAs was primarily a manual task, often not integrated across the IT landscape. It typically involved comparing a few single variables to the promised service performance and delivery. This traditional approach was reactive, limited to controlling damage after violations occurred. Its alerting capabilities were simple at best and conveyed no information of value to IT personnel. Today, IT departments must deal with fast-paced, ever-changing business and service demandsand service-level commitments are often complex, multi-variable agreements. As a result, SLA management needs to be both proactive and predictive, with the ability to act automatically to head off potential violations and to keep IT departments closely apprised of SLA status and associated costs. In short, SLA management today is no longer about damage control: its about predictive service-level management that avoids any damage in the first place. Thats why, to simplify the ever-increasing complexity of SLA management and avoid expensive penalties, todays IT departments need: A single, integrated solution that enables them to manage SLAs, business processes, applications, and IT infrastructure with one comprehensive tool. An intelligent pattern-mapping capability that can predict potential violations before they occur. 1

The Dynamic Way to Manage SLAs: UC4 Service Level Governor

UC4 Service Level Governor identifies and avoids potential SLA violations by analyzing patterns and making automated decisions that ensure optimal service delivery. The solution supports data integration and analysis from different sources and checks key indicators, such as costs and performance, in real-time. If it determines that SLA violations are imminent, it can take automated actions to avert themsuch as provisioning additional resources or reprioritizing workloadsas well as sending out alerts to the appropriate staff members. UC4 Service Level Governor is designed for organizations that face problems with quality of service and SLA violation penalties, want to simplify SLA management, or lack an easy-touse SLA reporting tool. Its monitoring, pattern detection, alerting, and predictive execution capabilities simplify complexity at the exact points where intricacies cause the greatest difficulties in keeping service-level commitments. The solution enables customers to predictively avoid SLA violations and the associated penalties, gain a comprehensive overview of their service-level agreements, and easily manage them for optimal performance. The New Generation of Service Level Management The constantly changing nature of business demands today requires SLA management tools that are able to adapt quickly and automatically to changes, automate decisions, and scale out as needed. The UC4 Service Level Governor meets all of these requirements. Its complex event processing (CEP) engine uses pattern mapping to predict violations in advance and then automatically takes corrective actions to avoid them. Because the solution is able to govern all aspects of the IT environmentbusiness processes, applications, and IT infrastructure, in physical, virtual, and cloud computing environmentsit can define exactly which measures will be most effective in avoiding SLA violations and controlling costs. And because it was architected for the cloud, it allows for fast scalability of all resources. Business Improvements Service quality improvement is a continuous process in which companies typically invest a lot of time and resources. UC4 speeds up this process with central orchestration of business processes, applications, and infrastructure. In addition, by managing SLAs proactively and providing real-time visibility into business and IT processes, UC4 ensures smoother delivery of services, minimizes the possibility of failures, and increases companies confidence in their ability to deliver a high level of business value. The UC4 solution results in more efficient use of resources, as well. Traditional SLA tools are not able to provision and de-provision resources according to workload requirements, leading to under-utilization, cloud sprawl, or bottlenecks. In fact, many SLA solutions fail to manage infrastructure at all. In contrast, UC4 Service Level Governor can provision and deprovision infrastructure in real time in response to changing workloads, resulting in improvements in both resource utilization and throughput. Examining Scenarios To Make the Best Choice Sometimes an impending SLA violation is unavoidable. In these cases, you need to be able to reprioritize tasks and reassign resources in a way that minimizes disruption and penalties. With the complexity inherent in todays IT environments, this task can be difficult, as a seemingly simple change may result in additional costs for virtual resources, incur penalties due to another SLA being missed, or slow down other critical processesor the whole system. Even a miniscule change can result in a snowball effect that might end up costing more than the penalty for the initial violation. The UC4 Service Level Governor offers scenario modeling capabilities that avoid these problems. By examining and comparing the monetary and performance cost of every change, it can choose the best course of action automatically. 2

UC4 Service Level GovernorSolution Details

Key capabilities in UC4 Service Level Governor include its proactive SLA management wizard, real-time SLA monitoring dashboard, and the SLA reporting and advanced analytics dashboard. Each of these capabilities is described in more detail below. Proactive SLA Management Wizard The SLA management wizard provides a dashboard overview of all defined SLA rules and simplifies the definition of conditions to be tracked, automated actions to be taken when the system foresees a problem, and alerts to be sent out if an SLA violation is likely to occur. The system supports two types of service-level agreements: Process-flow based SLAs: For these SLAs, UC4 closely monitors specified process flows to ensure that they comply with SLA specifications. Event-based SLAs: For these SLAs, UC4 monitors processes for the occurrence of specified event types at particular times and compares event attributes with any number of defined conditions to make sure they meet SLA requirements.

Figure 1 shows an example of the user interface for the service level management wizard.

Figure 1. The service level management wizard makes it easy to define rules for process flows and events and to manage SLAs based on delivery time and costs.

With the SLA management wizard, you can set up SLA tracking in minutes, specifying all time and cost factors to be tracked as well as the content to be included in notifications: SLA time conditions. You can set up tracking of time conditions based either on an automation engine calendar or on a manually defined calendar. The first option is most relevant for clock-time SLAs, as it tells the system on which days to expect instances of the defined process flows. The second option does not specify when the process flow is expected to run, so in such cases, UC4 will monitor every newly started instance. You can define exceptions for both optionsfor example, specifying that the conditions dont apply to weekends, or to a particular time window. In this way, you can exclude instances started within the exception periods from being monitored for occurrences of the SLA condition. Cost models. The UC4 Service Level Governor offers different models for defining SLA costs, depending on the SLA typefor example, whether costs are based on runtime violations or clock-time violations. Notification text. You can specify the SLA data or data attributes to be included in notifications.

Real-time SLA Monitoring Dashboard The SLA monitoring dashboard, shown in Figure 2, gives users all the service-level information they need in real time. It provides a comprehensive overview of fulfilled and violated SLAs, along with full visibility of SLA-critical jobs. The dashboards ability to forecast completion time and penalties make it an essential tool for ensuring that service levels are met.

Figure 2. The SLA monitoring dashboard lets users see the status of all SLAs in real time.

You can assign customized roles to users to govern their access rights and the rules they see displayed. Color coding makes it easy to determine if at least one SLA is violated (red), a violation is predicted (yellow), or no current or predicted violations are detected (green). Dropdown fields allow easy access to the dashboards filtering functions, and you can add and remove columns to customize the grid view. SLA Reporting and Advanced Analytics Dashboard The UC4 Service Level Governor uses advanced analytics to seek patterns leading to SLA problems, so it can prevent SLA breaches in the future. Its analytics also enable it to calculate costsboth those that will be incurred by breached SLAs and those required to fix the problem. As a result, every incident brings new knowledge and helps reduce future costs. The SLA reporting and advanced analytics dashboard, shown in Figure 3, tracks the fulfilment or violation of SLAs over extended periods of time (such as on a quarterly or yearly basis), providing a rapid overview of SLA-critical incidents as well as a detailed analysis of all dependencies. With intuitive charts and tables, comprehensive export capabilities, and the ability to manage report formats, the dashboard gives you all the tools you need to create helpful, easy-to-understand printed reports. By improving traceability, these customized reports make it easier to comply with audit requirements.

Figure 3. The SLA reporting dashboard provides a full history of SLA fulfilments and violations in a printable format.

Report types available include: SLA fulfilment report: Aggregation of fulfilled and violated SLAs over a specified time period. Cost report: Aggregation of SLA costs over an extended time period. SLA buffer report: Average of SLA buffer times (ratio of runtime to clock time) SLA history: List of all SLA problems over time.

Conclusion
Automation is truly effective only when it is combined with intelligence, as is the case with UC4 Service Level Governor. Its real-time performance data and intelligent, automated decision making enable it to predict and prevent most SLA violationswhether by assigning more CPUs or memory to a virtual machine, adding additional virtual machines, or using resources from the cloud. It also has the intelligence to de-provision added resources when they are no longer needed. In those few cases where a violation is inevitable, the UC4 Service Level Governor will compare the severity of violation penalties with the costs required to fix the problem to determine the best course of action. With UC4 Service Level Governors real-time monitoring of service levels and intelligent automation, you can: Manage your service levels proactively to deliver highest quality of service. Predictively provision and de-provision IT resources to deliver the desired service levels at the lowest possible operational costs. Stay on top of costs and be informed about all penalties for SLA violations in real time, so you can avoid costly violations of service-level agreements. Deliver great service that keeps your customers happy.

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