Service Level Management

What's Preventing Service-level Management?

Companies need service-level management to make sure they meet service-level agreements (SLAs) and optimize service delivery to improve business outcomes. However, this level of management is not easy to accomplish with today's distributed, interconnected applications because they execute on heterogeneous systems in different locations. As a result, getting end-to-end visibility to track real-time processes and assure individual business transactions meet SLAs is a challenge.

Traditional management tools are used after users report problems. They focus on what's going on in application servers and hard drives, not on what's going on in the infrastructure from a business point of view, i.e., what infrastructure is serving this or that customer. Many IT departments cobble together ways of getting visibility into what's happening and applying policies, but this is an expensive, inefficient, and often unsuccessful way to get control of SLAs and business processing.

Progress® Actional® Enterprise solves this problem.

Policy-based Service-level Management for Meeting SLAs

Actional's automatic, end-to-end transaction monitoring and policy-based alerting enable you to understand and manage processes to meet SLAs and support business priorities. Actional automatically discovers and controls services and end-to-end business process flows. You see, and get data on, how services are being delivered to customers and other end users.

Just as important, you can control service delivery through policies. Actional provides tools to configure policies, including setting service alert thresholds and defining behavior for dynamic IT management. Policies can be authored to meet specific business needs—from simply monitoring average metrics or setting policy for a single transaction, to creating a single policy that combines multiple metrics and multiple classes of service.

When a policy is violated, Actional provides an alert and automatically generates a flow map of the end-to-end violating transaction and related statistics. As a result, you can quickly analyze the root cause of the problem and repair it before an SLA is violated or a full-blown crisis occurs.

Figure: Automatic flow map of individual "violating" transaction.

With service-level management you can also control service and application processing to improve business outcomes. Here's how it works.

Actional gives you the business insight you need to make management decisions. Its Flow Mapping™ technology relates business process execution to the underlying IT activity, without manual modeling, generating multi-dimensional business metrics and analytics related to runtime operations. It captures service levels, process metrics like order-to-fulfillment times, and key business indicators and presents them for simultaneous viewing and analysis on a differentiated basis: by individual customer, customer class or group, region, division, or any other custom dimension.

Figure: Dashboard showing multi-dimensional business metrics.

Based on this information, you can use Actional's dynamic and manual controls for changing processing behavior to support business goals. For example, you can accommodate temporary issues like congestion or service outages or control long-term service delivery, for example, giving priority processing to high-value transactions and important customers. These actions are achieved through policies and alerting, content-based routing, load balancing, stabilizing switches, and failover.

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Related Topics:

• Transaction Monitoring and Alerting
• Exception Management
• Root Cause Analysis
• Data Interoperability