SLA management

IT’s primary task is to deliver business services. Behind every service is a promise to the customer or business partner that a service will meet agreed-upon baselines for performance and availability. When those agreements are not met, the result is monetary in one form or another—whether it’s direct fines, lost business or customer churn. Therefore, actively managing service levels and ensuring compliance with business goals is crucial to every IT organization’s success.

AmberPoint Management System delivers SLA management for service components and the business transactions that flow across them. Operations staff can monitor for compliance against business objectives, anticipate failures, identify trends and respond to issues. Business managers can see how their customers are served. Developers can see how their services are faring in the wild. Historical reporting provides transparency for customers and partners, who rely on SLAs to ensure reliability and availability of the services they depend on.

AmberPoint provides predictability, visibility and control for composite applications, delivering SLA Management for individual service components as well as end-to-end business transactions.

• Provides service level management for processes spanning heterogeneous environments—for both business and operational data
• Segments and prioritizes service resources by business criteria—such as focusing on most valuable users (customers, partners, etc.) or providing the best QoS during peak hours
• Automated throttling protects service performance against unexpected spikes in traffic
• Prevents service problems with early warnings, impact analysis and timely actions to mitigate issues
• Provides detailed usage analysis over time to identify trends and uncover revenue opportunities

amberpoint capabilities

Define and Differentiate

• Support for realistic baselines, drawn from runtime data and historical trends
• Define internal objectives and formal SLAs for customers
• Set multiple thresholds for warnings and failures; define actions for each

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

Alert and Pro-actively Remediate Issues

• Proactive alerts including intelligent filtering and useful business content
• Identify QoS issues within processes and applications
• Define real-time mitigation to prevent service failures
• Automatically modify service characteristics to head off SLA breaches
• Throttle traffic in real-time to prevent issues
• Automate availability and performance optimization
• Configurable alerts: email, pager, fax, etc.

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

Analysis and Prioritization

• Performance baselines set targets for normal/abnormal behavior
• Early-warning "tripwires" alert against service-level objectives breaches
• Calendaring for peak and off-peak hours
• Scheduled downtimes to prevent alerts during routine maintenance
• Automatic time-zone adjustments for geographically distributed deployments
• Analyze quality of service using corporate business intelligence, statistical or reporting tools