Managing Application Performance SLAs

End User Experience Today (Jul 5 2011)

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   Challenges of Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management in Today’s Complex IT Environments

   The applications delivered by today’s IT organizations are the lifeblood of many businesses. According to analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates, large companies report that downtime can cost in excess of $15,000 per minute for technology-dependent organizations, as applications drive revenue, productivity, and brand value.

   At the same time, these applications and their delivery become increasingly complex every year. As the importance of Service Level Agreement (SLA) management continues to increase, so do the challenges around ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) levels. Yesterday’s state-of-the art consisted of building applications to run as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) composite services. SOA is now mainstream and newer IT initiatives, such as cloud computing and desktop virtualization, have made these application environments even more complex.

   As a result of this complexity, fueled by the ever changing landscape of application delivery models, the vantage point of the End User is quickly becoming the primary – if not only - measure of whether SLAs are being met.

   Comprehensive SLA Management with Aternity

   With Aternity’s advanced analytics capabilities, enterprises benefit from recognizing performance issues long before end users do, and determining the extent and impact of the problem. This dramatically reduces the duration of business disruptions and the resulting costs of resolving these service level issues.

   Specifically, Aternity’s Frontline Performance Intelligence (FPI) Platform addresses the need for managing SLA compliance by validating performance and availability of all transactions for all end users, verifying if contractual commitments have been met, and identifying outliers.

   Listed below are a few key SLA management benefits of Aternity’s Frontline Performance Intelligence (FPI) Platform:

   • Enables configuration of SLAs per location, application and activity level to provide granular performance compliance scores
   • Provides the ability to retain SLA data scores historically for rapid reporting on SLA trends and key measurements that may impact current or future performance
   • Establishes unavailability penalties based on volume baselines of how real end users were actually experiencing the IT service for more accurate reporting of SLA penalties
   • Provides the real-time analytics and flexibility in reporting to help IT organizations prepare for planned outages, proactively manage and remediate issues to protect from blackouts, and automatically identify duplicate outages or overlaps to avoid double penalties

   To learn more about Aternity and qualify for a Proof of Concept based on your IT environment, visit www.aternity.com/poc.htm

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