Eye of the Storm for Service Level Management

Overview

Eye of the Storm® (EYE) is a highly flexible IT infrastructure management solution. This paper summarizes its application as a Service Level Management tool, including management of Service Level Agreements (SLA).

What is Service Level Management?
SLAs define the quality of service that the consumer of the service expects to receive and the provider of the service expects to deliver. Providers may be an internal IT group providing infrastructure services to business units within an enterprise, or an ISP for example.

Whether you are the provider or consumer, identifying and measuring network access and service delivery is the only way of assuring the quality of that delivery. Eye of the Storm service level management supports both the formal approach of SLAs and a range of other metrics and reports that support a more informal approach to managing service delivery.

Eye of the Storm allows you to set different SLAs for different areas of the managed infrastructure, for different customers, technologies and applications. Designed for easy to control SLA management, with comprehensive and readily understandable SLA reports, Eye of the Storm allows all involved to agree on service delivery.

Easy to Implement Service Level Management
Eye of the Storm implements SLAs as part of the wider integrated infrastructure management solution. SLAs are set against Business Views, allowing both high level and fine detail control.

Service levels can be set against a full range of metrics including:

• Faults, raised against managed infrastructure objects, for example applications, application servers and devices.
• Congestion, the ratio of packets sent by the port to those unable to be transmitted.
• Application Availability, percentage of time the application is available. This can be measured at the application, application server and network levels.
• Application Latency, the delay in application response.
• Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), average time between asset failure, measurable against application, application server, network and WAN link levels.
• Mean Time To Repair (MTTR), average time to repair asset failure, measurable at application, application server, network and WAN link levels.
• Utilization measures, for example set against CPU, bandwidth and line. The range of service level indicators allows a broader, more business aware definition of service delivery. MTTR and MTBF are especially important when measuring how service delivery impacts a business.

Eye of the Storm functionality for Service Level Management

Bulletin Board shows source and impact of infrastructure events

Real-time graphing of service delivery against SLAs

Day-to-Day Service Level Management
Eye of the Storm’s performance capabilities allow raising of events that indicate where problems on the infrastructure are likely to occur. Proactive management of the infrastructure prevents performance degradation from making services unavailable and impacting SLAs.

Highly configurable event and service level thresholds allow you to tailor Eye of the Storm to reflect agreed service levels. Early notification of problems that could lead to the violation of those agreements is crucial. Eye of the Storm allows you to set the method of notification that best suits you. For example:

• Event Manager can be configured with color coding, audio alarms, annotations. These can be set for an event type, for a particular network asset or a combination of the two.
• Asset Navigator can display the topology of the critical paths, displaying in real time state changes and identifying the true cause of each change.
• Notification integration allows you to forward key events by e-mail and text messaging.
• Integration solutions allow forwarding of alarms to leading Manager of Managers solutions.
• Eye of the Storm allows you to graph both SLA levels and actual performance, useful for analyzing SLA performance.

Example SLA Application Availability Interactive Query

Transparent Service Level Management
Successful Service Level Management requires not only delivery of service that satisfies both provider and consumer, but also proof of that delivery. It is here Eye of the Storm's report suite delivers:

• Executive overviews through the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) reports. Service delivery is identifi ed using a selected metric, e.g. CPU Utilization. Reports include trending and TopN sections, ideal for medium and long term planning.
• IT Management overviews provide high level breakdowns of service delivery. For example, Availability Summary reports on application, application server, network and WAN link service delivery.
• Interactive Queries provide a metric-by-metric breakdown of service delivery. Together with a TopN assets and drill-down facility they are an ideal basis for investigating service delivery.
• Consumer access to service management reports through pdf distribution, extranet interface and XML interfaces.
• Custom report functionality that allows the building of Flex Reports and custom interfaces through the EYE COM API to your particular requirements.

Component Viewer clearly displays in depth inventory data

Eye of the Storm IP SLA Performance
Eye of the Storm's IP SLA Performance module provides infrastructure monitoring from layer 3 and above. This module implements Cisco's IOS IP SLA - formerly known as Cisco Service Assurance Agent (SAA), allowing you to leverage your current investment in Cisco devices and the Cisco IOS®.

IP SLA's per-class traffic monitoring allows easy application of metrics to key SLAs. For example, UDP jitter probes measure one way latency, round-trip latency, jitter and packet loss. These are all useful when monitoring infrastructure circuit quality and behavior, for example on VoIP.

Eye of the Storm implements SAA probes by:

• Identifying links between devices through IP Pairing.
• Identifying the probes each device can support.
• Defaulting sensible probe configuration values.
• Creating probes with a limited life span (450 seconds), so probes expire rather than Eye of the Storm having to delete them.

Within Eye of the Storm these paired links can be grouped together to form end-to-end paths (EEPs). EEPs can be created to monitor both client-server and infrastructure performance. Eye of the Storm currently supports these IP SLA probe types:

• DHCP _ TCP Connect
• DNS _ UDP Echo
• HTTP _ UDP Jitter
• ICMP Echo

IP SLA information can be viewed through Component Viewer and graphed using Attribute Grapher. IP SLA information is also available through Flex Reports.

EYE's IP SLA Modules supports popular performance probes

Example IP SLA implementation showing SAA enabled routers and switches. Only probes are created on the devices, IP Pairings and EEPs only exist with EYE.

Eye of the Storm Summary
Eye of the Storm combines IT performance, fault and inventory management into one powerful IT network management solution. Its integrated database aligns business applications with IT infrastructure and provides the historical context required to detect, isolate and report performance and service degradations in real time. The highly flexible reporting engine supports both ad hoc data queries and scheduled reports.

EYE users find its ease of deployment, ease of use, and immediate ROI key differentiators. Entuity’s customers are some of the largest companies in the world with the most complex networks imaginable. They include: Banc of America Securities, Credit Suisse First Boston, IBM Global Services, JP Morgan, Lloyds TSB, Nomura, MetLife, O2, Universal Studios, University of Minnesota, Magellan Health Services, Cooperative Financial Services, United States National Guard and California State University.

Eye of the Storm Integrated Network Management
The convergence of different types of information allows Eye of the Storm a unique understanding of network events, changes in network usage and their impact on your business:

• Performance Management uses Service Degradation Sensitivity to predict problems, so infrastructure managers can take action before users notice.
• Fault Management distinguishes between network, server and application faults and then reports the True Cause along with its business implications.
• Inventory Management provides a full inventory of IT infrastructure assets and what they are connected to. Included is a Spare Ports Report that can save you more than the cost of the Entuity solution in a single session.

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