What is an SLA?
SLA stands for Service Level Agreement. New Edge Networks understands that network performance is extremely important to business customers, that speed is paramount, and that interrupted access to the Internet and e-mail means lost revenue. That’s why we hold service level agreements with Internet service providers (ISPs), guaranteeing that our users’ connections perform optimally. In the event that our service falls below standard, we assume financial penalties. Many local phone companies do not offer SDSL, or service level agreements on their ADSL services. Furthermore, they tend to overload their networks with too many subscribers, causing network congestion and slower performance speeds.
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) provides advanced monitoring capabilities for services and operations to ensure that they meet pre-defined operational requirements. SOA Software’s Service Manager implements very rich and powerful SLA monitoring with unique enterprise-class features. The distributed data collection combined with centralized analysis employed by the Service Manager ensures comprehensive, accurate performance monitoring. The Service Manager defines SLA policies that can then be applied by reference or copy to an operation or service. This provides the flexibility to be able to define central performance and availability monitoring policies that, when changed, will affect all services or operations to which they the policies have been applied. SLA policies can be defined for many criteria including, throughput, response time, availability, number of errors, etc.
A service level agreement (SLA), in its most basic form, is a contractual commitment to meet specific goals. If, for example, you sign up for a hosting contract with a provider, you may desire an SLA that measures the up-time of your website. If you outsource your help desk, you may want an SLA that measures the time it takes to answer the phone. Usually, an SLA includes a penalty and/or reward framework. For example, many web hosting companies offer a refund based on the number of hours your website is unavailable. On the flip-side, an SLA may include an extra bonus to your help desk provider if all calls are answered within 30 seconds. The following are typical examples of SLA’s: “All help desk call will be answered within 90 seconds” “95% of all bills will be printed and delivered on time” “The website will be available 99.99%” “Project X will be delivered within 2 weeks of the planned schedule” What isn’t an SLA? An SLA is not a way to cut your costs. Rather, SLA’s are mechanisms f
