Service level management is crucial to any organization planning to make production use of enterprise SOA—no matter how far along the adoption path they are.

When you’re first starting with SOA, success hinges on defining, tracking and controlling appropriate service levels over the course of a pilot project. When implementing an SOA-based system, you need to review and analyze quality-of-service (QoS) metrics in order to plan for growth, minimize risk and justify additional investments.

Once you’ve migrated to more complex, federated services-based systems, you need to evaluate service level goals over extended periods of time, across continuous and discontinuous processes and prioritize shared SOA application resources by relevant business context—such as customer type, product line or business unit.

To maintain the quality of your services, you’ve got to head off potential problems by proactively resolving any issues that arise. To do so effectively, you need a management solution that provides full coverage for disparate formats, protocols, interface and transports.

AMBERPOINT SERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT

AmberPoint provides predictability, visibility and control for production SOA systems:

• Service level management for processes, across heterogeneous environments, for both business and operational data
• Segment and prioritize service resources by business criteria—such as focusing on most valuable users (customers, partners, etc.) or providing the best QoS during peak hours
• Prevent service problems with early warnings, impact analysis and timely mitigating actions
• Detailed usage analysis over time to identify trends and revenue opportunities

AmberPoint meets the needs of a variety of users. Developers can view complete service level metrics for each Web service they build or deploy. Operations can anticipate failures, identify trends and respond to issues. And business managers can see how their customers are served.

CLOSED-LOOP SERVICE LEVEL MANAGEMENT

AmberPoint enables organizations to close the loop as they set and manage service level objectives, prioritize quality of service and allocate resources by business priority.

Define and Differentiate

• Ongoing discovery of new customers and service levels
• Establish baselines, using data from production environment
• Define internal objectives and formal SLAs for customers
• Set multiple thresholds for warnings and failures; define actions for each
• Distinguish and group XML traffic by message content and context

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Measure and Evaluate

• Detailed service level views by operations, services, processes/applications, customers or user-defined business context
• Continuous evaluation of service level objectives
• Easy visualization of objectives and overall system health

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Alert and Mitigate

• Proactive alerts including intelligent filtering and useful business content
• Define real-time mitigation to prevent service failures
• Identify QoS issues within processes and applications
• Easily drill down to problematic Web services
• Automate availability and performance optimization
• Configurable alerts: email, pager, fax, etc.

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Analyze and Predict

• Identify and predict potential problems and trends
• Scheduled, targeted reports for customers and business managers
• Fine-tune service levels and thresholds to improve QoS
• Ensure expected business milestones along with QoS indicators
• Explore revenue opportunities such as value added services for active users

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FEATURES

Manage Interactions across Multiple Services

• Across WSDL-less Web services, SOAP/XML, non-SOAP/XML, HTML, Servlets, JSP, HTTP, JMS, Java and .NET
• Both operational and business data
• For continuous or discontinuous interactions

Customizable UI Provides Easy Navigation & Viewing

• Portal interface with user-configurable layout and labels
• Real-time, interactive charts span multiple time periods
• Quick links for common tasks and queries

Analysis and Prioritization

• Use baselines to set targets for normal/abnormal behavior
• Information analyzers sort and filter large amounts of data
• Define separate goals for peak and off-peak hours
• Specify downtimes or holidays to prevent unwanted alerts during routine maintenance
• Easily and accurately manage SLAs using calendar periods
• Set early-warning thresholds to gain immediate visibility for longer-term service-level objectives
• Allows automatic time-zone adjustments for distributed deployments
• Analyzes quality of service using corporate business intelligence, statistical or reporting tools