The ongoing task of determining whether a service provider is in compliance with its SLAs involves the following processes:
Collecting data
Storing data
Defining objectives
Defining SLAs
Monitoring
Reporting
Operations Center has various tools to aid in each of these steps, which are described in more detail in the sections of this guide. The last section of the guide is a demo to set up and walk through to gain some hands‑on experience with the tools described. Operations Center components all have licensing requirements. For more information, see the documentation for these components, or contact Technical Support.
Determining if service quality meets the levels contractually required by SLAs requires measurable data, such as availability. To calculate such data, Operations Center requires data input regarding the components of the service, such as hardware and network connections. It is necessary to specify the following:
Sources for collecting data: Operations Center has adapters and other tools to aid in the collection of relevant data. This data is integrated into Operations Center. In addition, it is possible to use data already collected in a central database.
Where to store data: You must establish databases and database connections to store the data. Operations Center has databases to store the data or you can connect Operations Center to an external data source.
Data to collect: For data integrated into Operations Center, select the elements that represent your service and the relevant properties that define the elements. Also establish relationships between elements. These relationships, as well as the properties of an element, determine the element condition. For data in an external data source, decide which properties are relevant and how those properties relate to each other.
When to collect data: Operations Center provides time management functionality for specifying when to collect data that is stored in the Operations Center server.
The two main approaches for collecting SLA data are:
Integrate Data into Operations Center: This approach can take advantage of all the Operations Center capabilities for defining SLAs and monitoring them, and for reporting on SLA-related data. Operations Center has adapters for integrating data from other business management systems, and tools for collecting data.
Use Data from an External Data Source: This approach allows you to determine a key metric based on data stored in an external database and define an SLA based on that key metric. It is not necessary to integrate any existing data into Operations Center, which avoids creating a duplicate data store. However, you must be very familiar with the data in the external data source and how it is stored and structured.
Use either or both of these approaches for different elements.
The Service Level Manager (SLM) is Operations Center’s tool for defining and implementing SLAs. SLM has the following components:
SLM Engine: Measures and monitors service level metrics and handles all warning and violation activity.
Business Service Warehouse: Stores service level metrics, alarm history, and historical performance data.
Console: Client used to access SLM data and functionality.
To use SLM, you must purchase a SLM license key for each Operations Center server. This includes all Operations Center servers that are used for capturing and monitoring data including data captured using an InterCommunication adapter. For more information about licensing, contact Technical Support.
The SLM tool is explained more fully throughout this guide.
Operations Center dashboard has various options for monitoring and reporting on SLA data. For more information, see the Operations Center 5.6 Dashboard Guide
SQL Views provides functionality in Operations Center that allows for third-party applications to have read access to Operations Center data in the warehouse. For more information, see the Operations Center 5.6 SQL Views Guide.
The Operations Center Web Services Application Programmer Interface (WSAPI) (also known as Web Services) is an integration point for customer or third-party applications to interact with the Operations Center server including SLA data. For more information, see the Operations Center 5.5 Web Services Guide.