Automated monitoring and reporting of enterprise quality of service

Formal Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are increasingly common as a way of ensuring quality of service (QoS). SLA's generally take the form of one or more specific QoS metrics that are evaluated over a specific time interval to a set of defined objectives. As applied to information systems SLA metrics are often performance-related, such as system availability or transaction response time. SLA metrics can also be formulated in terms of higher-level service aspects such as help-desk problem resolution volume and responsiveness. This paper discusses techniques for monitoring compliance of SLA's and displaying results using automated web-based tools.