Network SLA

Thu Feb 19 20:16:42 UTC 2009

Saqib Ilyas wrote:
> Greetings
> I am curious to know about any tools/techniques that a service provider uses
> to assess an SLA before signing it. That is to say, how does an
> administrator know if he/she can meet what he is promising. Is it based on
> experience? Are there commonly used tools for this?
> Thanks and best regards
>   
Not necessarily as a direct answer (I am pretty sure there'll be others 
on this list giving details in the area of specific tools and 
standards), but I think this may be a question (especially considering 
your end result concern: *signing the SLA!) equally applicable to your 
legal department. In the environment we live, nowadays, the SLA could 
(should?!? ... unfortunately) be "refined" and (at the other end - i.e. 
receiving) "interpreted" by the lawyers, with possibly equal effects 
(mostly financial and as overall impact on the business) as the tools we 
(the technical people) would be using to measure latency, uptime, 
bandwidth, jitter, etc...

Stefan