Overview

This section reviews the Business Service Monitoring (BSM) application located under the Business option in GroundWork Monitor along with SLA Management and SLA Reports.

1.0 About Business Service Monitoring (BSM)

Business Service Monitoring (BSM) provides the capability to represent the condition of business groups, processes and applications according to the combined states of individually monitored hosts and services.  The method allows the free combining of hosts, services and/or groups as components of named groups. The combinations can be assigned numerical values to weigh or qualify the member items. In this way we can produce a hierarchical representation of the state of business services independently of the methods used to monitor components.

Notifications and state changes of BSM groups are integrated into the GroundWork Monitor system using the Notification Manager (NoMA) engine and the Event Console for further processing. Creating BSM entities and enabling them does not require configuration changes and subsequent commits.

2.0 About SLA Management

• The SLA Management feature allows you to administer Service Level Agreements (SLA) and measure your business service performance. A SLA is a target of performance and quality for a service that is agreed to by a provider and client. SLAs are associated with the following components;
  • Calendar - Incorporates predefined geographic locations and their holidays.
  • Operation Time - Indicates the agreed days and times of operation.
  • Holidays - The location where actual holidays are defined for use within the calendar configuration.
  • Contracts - Allow for an agreement of service and contain a measured item and a target availability (e.g. the contract item could be Local Host Availability, the measured item the Host and a Service with a Target Availability set at 98 percent availability).
  • Downtime - Where you can list the specific scheduled system downtimes that directly affect SLA reporting. SLA reporting provides information on monitored elements availability to ensure quality of service, and a scheduled system maintenance downtime is something you probably wouldn't want to include in the overall calculations of a report.
• SLA Reports - SLA reporting provides information on monitored elements availability to ensure quality of service. A scheduled system maintenance downtime is something you probably wouldn't want to include in the overall calculations of a report. The Business > SLA Reports option allows you produce two types of service level agreement reports, a website report to view directly or an XML file type report to download.