Scenario task 9 - Define compliance measurements

Incident response and resolution compliance is required across two of the service offerings in the first phase, and the compliance targets are identical. The email service will only be tracking incident resolution compliance. The service target definitions associated with these agreements could be reused if the criteria that defines them are similar.

Although there are several attributes used to define an incident, the Calbro service level management team believes that three items could be used to differentiate one incident from another. These items are the company name, priority of the incident, and the business service for which the incident was created. By default, BMC Incident Management defines four incident priority levels including critical, high, medium, and low, and Calbro makes use of all them. A service target definition is required for incident response, incident resolution, and for each of the priority levels. The following table outlines the service target definitions for incident tracking in phase 1.

The following table shows tracking service target definitions: 
Incident tracking service target definitions for a discount equity brokerage service

The following table shows tracking service target definitions:
Incident tracking service target definitions for an online retail banking service

The following table shows tracking service target definitions:
Incident tracking service target definitions for an email service

After reviewing the incident tracking definitions, the Calbro service level administrator noticed that both the incident response and resolution service target definitions were the same, providing a possible opportunity for reuse. The service target definitions for a specific goal type (like incident response) will be used by BMC Service Level Management (BMC SLM) to calculate a compliance target. However, making such a calculation requires that you understand the relative importance of one service target to another. This relative importance is expressed as a weighting that is assigned to each service target within a goal type and collectively must add up to 100%. Working with the business relationship managers, the service level administrator was able to arrive at a weighting for incident priority that worked well for both internal and external services. Critical priority incidents were considered four times as important as low priority incidents (for example, missing the goal time of four low priority incidents would be the same as missing the goal time on a single critical priority incident). High and medium priority incidents were also assigned a percentage of the total compliance, and the following service target weighting schedule was created:

• Critical incident response or resolution - 40%
• High incident response or resolution - 30%
• Medium incident response or resolution - 20%
• Low incident response or resolution - 10%

Tracking change and service requests were the next compliance targets on the list, and the Calbro service level management team understands that these service target definitions will be similar to those defined for incidents. The main difference between them is the goal type and the measurement criteria.
For the first phase of the service level management project, change requests will only be tracked for the discount equity brokerage, basic service offering. However, in phase two online retail banking, standard and email, generic service offerings will begin tracking change requests as well. The service level administrator will map out both phases looking for potential areas of reusability. The following table outlines the service target definitions for change tracking in phase 1 and 2.

The following table shows the request tracking service target definitions:
Change request tracking service target definitions for a discount equity brokerage service

The following table shows the request tracking service target definitions:
Change request tracking service target definitions for an online retail banking service (phase 2)

The following table shows the request tracking service target definitions:
Change request tracking service target definitions for an email service (phase 2)

The change request completion service targets appear to be fairly similar across the service offerings with the only differences appearing in impact cost and when the warning status is set. The service level administrator and the business relationship managers will discuss and verify whether the values are warranted or whether they can be aligned. Because change requests used the same priority scheme as incidents, the Calbro team decided to use the same service target weighting used by the incident service targets.

Service request compliance will be used to determine success of how well the Email - Generic service offering users' requests are being attended to; therefore, it will formulate an SLA between the users and the business. Reviewing the service level management plan in the following table, service request tracking is planned only for internal services, and only the Email service is expected to track compliance in the future. All email requests at Calbro are treated the same. Therefore, the two main goals for email service requests are response time and completion time. The following table defines the email service targets.

The following table shows service request tracking service target definitions:
Email service request tracking service target definitions

Critical to the success of the online retail banking service is the availability of Calbro ATM machines. Calbro's asset management team strictly maintains availability logs on each of the ATM machines within their ATM network. Availability information will be tracked by one or more service targets, and compliance will be calculated for a service level agreement that lets the business owner know if ATMs are available when their customers need them.

Each ATM machine will be represented as a configuration item (CI) in BMC Atrium CMDB, and outage records within BMC Asset Management will record the ATM's availability. The tier 1 ATM machines will be tracked in the first phase of the service level management project, and if testing goes well, then the much larger set of tier 2 ATM machines will be added in the second phase. The following table represents the service target that will be used to monitor the availability of tier 1 ATM machines.

The following table shows the availability tracking service target definition: 

ATM availability tracking service target definition

Unlike request-based service targets, the ATM availability service target continuously monitors the unavailability type for outage records created for one or more CIs, rather than having a set of terms and conditions that must be met before tracking begins. Because the service target runs continuously, you must provide a period in terms of months to let BMC SLM know how often a new tracking or measurement record will be created. The service level administrator has decided to use a one month tracking or life cycle interval. The Calbro business relationship manager has reviewed past usage patterns for the ATM machines and understands that weekends and night-time hours are particularly important to customers, when the normal banking facilities are closed. The following table shows a service target goal and impact cost schedule that was created to reflect the impact cost of an offline ATM machine or one with degraded service.

ATM unavailability goal and impact cost schedule

The remaining compliance targets include the tracking of transaction response time and the performance of infrastructure supporting the business services. For transaction response, Calbro's IT department uses BMC Transaction Application Response Time to periodically generate a synthetic transaction and measure the time required to receive a response. Accessibility to the discount equity brokerage main website and the turnaround time of a typical ATM machine transaction will be monitored using BMC Transaction Management Application Response Time. Service targets will be defined to fetch the values of specific key performance indicators (KPIs) from BMC Transaction Management Application Response Time on a regular basis and the results will be used to calculate compliance. The following table details the service targets that will be used to track transaction response time.

The following table shows response tracking service target definitions:
Transaction response tracking service target definitions for a discount equity brokerage service

The following table shows response tracking service target definitions:

Transaction response tracking service target definitions for an online retail banking service

Because each performance-related service target definition contains unique KPIs, it is not possible to reuse the definitions. Due to network and other communication problems, performance service targets may request the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) value; however, it may not receive any information back from the data source. Consequently, you must tell BMC SLM how to label the missing data values using the missing data rule. You use the processing frequency  to determine how often an service target is evaluated using the data received from a data source. Because both of these are high profile business services, the processing frequency will be every minute. It is important to note that the lower the processing frequency, the more computing resources are required. This can require Calbro to reconsider the processing frequency or reconsider the need to add additional hardware to their server if the number of monitoring ATM machines gets into the thousands.

The final performance service targets to define will support an OLA for the email service infrastructure. Calbro's bottom-up approach to service level management provided some performance KPIs that can be adjusted to fit their current needs. Past experience has shown that if Calbro's main email servers can be maintained at reasonable performance levels, the number of problems drops exponentially. The most critical KPIs include CPU utilization, the amount of free memory, and the amount of free disk space for the operating system. The IT department has used BMC Performance Manager for many years to monitor system availability and performance, and this solution will be used as a BMC SLM data source. The following table lists the service target definitions for performance compliance.

The table shows the service targets definitions:

Performance tracking service target definitions

You can define the performance service targets by using either status-based KPIs or numeric KPIs. The value of status-based KPIs is determined by the data source, whereas numeric KPIs (similar to those using in Calbro's performance service targets) require the service level administrator to determine which values are within an acceptable range.

The email service is the primary method of communication at Calbro, and the business owners require that the IT staff has a high sense of urgency when an email issue is encountered. As part of a pilot program, a portion of Calbro's IT budget has been set aside as bonus pay if the email service can meet or exceed the service expectations. However, BMC SLM will be used to track service impact costs, and these impact costs will reduce the overall payout of the bonus money. A BMC SLM dashboard is fully visible to the IT staff, so they can track their progress. If the pilot program works well, the Calbro business owners would like to expand these incentives to their external business services.

Where to go from here

Scenario task 10 - Notify stakeholders