SLA monitoring and reporting to customers

Gregori Parker Gregori.Parker at theplatform.com
Mon Mar 19 16:53:14 UTC 2007


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On Behalf Of
william(at)elan.net
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 3:20 AM
To: virendra rode //
Cc: Rubens Kuhl Jr.; NANOG list
Subject: Re: SLA monitoring and reporting to customers

> How is that part of SLA? Or do you mean you gurantee that
> your own upstream network connection would not be overutilized?
> ...
> accuracy of what? what type of errors, packet drops?

SLA's are simply contracts that two parties negotiate...any number of
metrics can be decided upon as the 'agreed level of service'.  Different
kinds of providers obviously have different metrics that are important -
while the availability of services is pretty ubiquitous, accuracy and
utilization might not make sense for an ISP SLA...then again they're
often deal-breakers for an ASP SLA.

> You wish to tell me you guarantee network connection to customer to
> be down for no more then 5 minutes during the year? Yeh, right :)
> (but don't let me discourage any of you in trying to achieve it!)

Maintenance Windows / Planned Downtime are nearly always present and
defined in an SLA, and should be excluded from the calculation of x
number of 9's.  Furthermore, all SLAs I've come across also include
'Emergency Windows' which can happen anytime given a pre-determined
amount of forewarning.  Limits of duration and frequency of these
windows should obviously be agreed upon in any good SLA.  Bottom line:
it's good practice for an SLA to define exactly what metrics are being
used, who is measuring them (read: third party, i.e. Keynote), how they
are measuring them (software/tools), what constitute a violation and
what the recompense should be.

- Gregori




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