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ITIL: Service Delivery

Service Level Management

The main objective of the Service Level Management discipline is to ensure the quality of IT services at an acceptable cost. This goal is accomplished by providing reports on the quality of IT services on a regular basis and working proactively to improve quality of service where needed.

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a written description of terms, parameters, and conditions that is used to determine that the network is meeting a guaranteed level of performance and defines the consequences if that performance level is not met. Typically, SLAs address quality of service conditions, such as response time, availability, speed, and so forth. A service provider typically has an SLA with its subscribers. An IT department may or may not have an internal SLA with its end users. Regardless of whether a formal SLA is in force, PacketShaper offers the tools for setting per-application goals, comparing actual performance to those goals, and quantifying compliance.

Service Provider SLAs    Because the PacketShaper sits at the demarcation point between your network and your service provider, it can measure the provider's performance and let you audit compliance to service level contracts. It can provide information on network SLAs (latency, ping time, availability) as well as application-specific SLAs (VoIP jitter or data center accessibility). PacketShaper's unique layer-7 application awareness makes it an essential tool for building application SLAs, monitoring the performance and ensuring that performance of specific applications across the WAN continually meets established standards.

Internal SLAs     PacketShaper's rich array of application and network performance metrics gives you the tools to construct your own internal measures of how applications are performing across the network. Many of these metrics are end-to-end and thus represent user-perceived performance. Internal SLAs can be useful for generating numerical measures of the performance of your infrastructure (and the effectiveness of the teams managing it). They can also be useful for constructing application delivery agreements between network and application teams — establishing measurable and demonstrable definitions of the resources required to successfully deliver an application to remote users.

Response-Time Measurement

Packeteer's response-time measurement (RTM) feature allows you to set acceptability standards and track whether performance meets those standards. First, you set a total delay threshold. This threshold is the acceptable response time for a particular traffic class. Response times are defined as "bad" or "good" according to the threshold you set. When a transaction's total delay is lower than the threshold, the transaction is considered good. When the total delay is higher, the transaction is considered bad.

After setting the total delay threshold, use the service level threshold to specify an acceptable percentage of transactions completed within one-minute intervals. PacketWise tracks the percentage of transactions during each one-minute interval that complete within the number of milliseconds indicated in the total delay threshold. If the percentage is below the specified service level threshold, that interval is considered unacceptable. PacketWise indicates the number of unacceptable intervals and the time of the last unacceptable interval in the Statistics: Response Time window.

When you've set a total delay threshold and service level threshold, you can see how a class is performing with respect to the thresholds by viewing the Service Level Compliance graph. It shows the percentage of transactions whose delays are in an acceptable range.

Synthetic Transactions

The PacketShaper not only measures the response time of every real transaction that occurs on the network, it also has the ability to generate synthetic transactions for checking performance and availability at times when there isn't any real user traffic. When this feature is configured, the PacketShaper will initiate synthetic pings, web, or other TCP transactions at periodic intervals to verify the availability of critical servers, as well as collect performance data. See Use Standardized, Artificial Traffic for Analysis.

Customer Portal

Packeteer's powerful customer portal feature offers service providers and IT managers the ability to design custom network and application status pages that can be viewed by customers. A customer could be a service provider's subscriber or it could be a company's end users or IT staff members. Examples of the type of information that can be displayed on a portal page include throughput, efficiency, response times, as well as statistics that indicate whether SLAs are being followed. The information can be displayed in graphical and/or statistical formats. The service provider can either create a single HTML page that has customized data for each portal user, or create an individual HTML page for each customer. For instance, you can have a customized portal for an application management group that tracks the performance of a single application.

View the other disciplines in the ITIL Service Delivery area:

Capacity Management

Continuity Management

Availability Management

Cost Management

Security Management