Service level enforcement
A hybrid cloud environment, not unlike any other service, needs to meet expectations. An SLA (service level agreement) is an explicit agreement regarding the level of service offered by a provider to a customer — measured in uptime, response time of the application, or other metrics important to measuring the quality of the service. Different organizations have different requirements based on specific criteria, such as as their size and industry.
In a traditional computing environment, users can track performance on their own dedicated hardware and software stack. In a highly dynamic cloud environment, however, the game changes. In the cloud, service levels are still going to be critical to delivering business value — only the tools with which they can be managed have changed. Traditional levers continue to exist, such as administrator response time. However, now, it is easier to pull other levers, such as adding capacity, moving a workload from one location to another, and reconfiguring networks — all of which can happen without interacting with the physical systems.
Given a service level, the resources of the cloud should not only align to meet that service level, but also, must be flexible enough to change over time. To ensure service levels are adequate, performance management tools must be in place. Without them, it is hard to tell whether the performance components of SLAs are met. The performance management of each cloud service should be married with automated remediation through capacity management and other mechanisms to address major causes of service level failures. Further, as workloads are increasingly sent to public cloud environments, performance management and service level management must be equally proficient at identifying issues in clouds hosted by third parties.
BMC offers solutions for service level enforcement to ensure the business is receiving the agreed-upon service levels. BMC Atrium Service Level Management, which spans physical, virtual, and cloud environments, measures and maintains consistent, quality services to users.
Key activities:
- Actively measure and manage service levels
- Automate remediation