SLA Review

'The Service Level Agreement, or SLA, is fundamental to service provision, from the perspective of both the supplier and the recipient. It essentially documents and defines the parameters of the relationship itself.' Source: IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). A well-defined SLA is critical for a good working relationship between the service provider and the client. Unfortunately, many performance SLAs are poorly defined or in some cases mathematically incorrect.

Need

• Identify whether the service provider is meeting the performance SLA requirements for an existing service
• Identify whether the performance SLA is appropriate for an existing or new service
• Identify whether the definition of the performance SLA is well defined
• Identify whether a performance SLA can actually be measured

Challenges

• Understanding performance measurements and how they relate to performance SLAs
• Instrumentation in applications in order to support performance SLAs
• Creating performance SLAs that can be applied to many different business transactions
• Making performance SLAs simple without losing their effectiveness
• Making performance SLAs comprehensive
• Relating performance SLAs to business need
• Validation of performance SLAs against actual measurements

Our Service

Our staff are skilled at defining and understanding performance SLAs for a wide range of IT services and business sectors, thereby delivering considerable added value. Capacitas offers a comprehensive range of activities associated with SLAs, comprising a suite of activities:

• Review of performance SLAs
  • Review of the current performance SLAs
  • Review of measured performance statistics
  • Production of a report that gives key recommendations to improve description and collection of performance SLAs

• Define performance SLAs
  • Understand the business requirements in relation to performance SLAs
  • Understand the business capabilities in terms of collection and measurement of the performance SLAs
  • Production of a document detailing the description of the performance SLAs and how they should be collected and measured
• SLA arbitration
  • Understand the business scenario and understand the current performance SLA description
  • Collect the appropriate performance SLA metrics from the IT services
  • Production of a report that outlines whether the IT service meets the performance SLA requirements

Capacitas can provide staff as and when needed at short notice. Our staff can use existing toolsets or recommend tool purchases as required

Features & Benefits

Delivering Results:

• Mitigates the risk of third parties providing poorly performing applications
• Reduce risk of service availability issues

Flexible Resourcing:

• Multiple staff can be used as-and-when needed, enabling the customer to ramp up and down performance testing quickly and cost-effectively
• Staff only used when needed – no on-going charges compared to permanent staff or contractors
• Testing can be conducted on-site or off-site (e.g. over VPNs) if appropriate

Value-for-Money:

• Our team combines both junior and senior performance analysts, thereby creating an average daily rate comparable with contract staff

Pragmatic Approach:

• Conduct analysis using a customer’s existing tools or standard system/application performance utilities rather than purchasing new tools
• Analysis can be done rapidly to meet customer’s time and budget requirements

Performance-Focussed Expertise:

• Ability to interpret what the SLA metrics mean in terms of service/application performance level

Example Customers

• BT
• HP

Next Steps

• Review the Resources section on this page
• To email for further information click here
• Call our offices on +44 (0) 20 7841 9950 to arrange a meeting