What is SLA Management?
IT professionals often ask us how they can bring workload automation closer to the business, particularly when it comes to Service Level Agreements, or SLAs for short. While reliable workload automation performance is essential for most organizations today, many organizations often struggle with a way to proactively manage workloads tied to SLAs.
Managing SLAs is extremely important when it comes to provider-customer relations. SLAs are a commitment between the provider and a customer, defining the level of service expected from the provider. For example, a Service Level Agreement could be an internal agreement between a Database Administrator (DBA) and the DBA’s company stating that in the event of a disaster, the maximum downtime for an application is 20 minutes.
Job scheduling and automation solutions provide the service of running and monitoring jobs and plans tied to Service Level Agreements.
The 3 Key Benefits of Using Workload Automation Software to Manage SLAs:
1. Advanced Monitoring and Alerting
IT can use the advanced features and capabilities of automation software to monitor and execute jobs and plans. For example, if you have an SLA plan that contains three jobs that are each supposed to run for five minutes, and the first job runs for ten minutes, it’s likely the SLA will breach and the plan won’t complete in the allotted 15 minutes. Instead of waiting for the plan to complete outside of the 15-minute time frame, IT Automation software can proactively monitor the plan’s progress and notify users before the plan breaches.
2. Utilize Dynamic Resource Provisioning
Using automation, IT can leverage just-in-time resource provisioning to assign more computing resources to an SLA job that is in danger of breaching. For example, if you see at the halfway point that an SLA job is taking longer than expected- you can have your automation solution take action to pool more resources together to help the job complete on time.
3. Prioritizing SLA Jobs
In any IT environment, some jobs or plans are going to be more critical than others. Usually SLA jobs are higher priority jobs than your routine, non-deadline jobs. Using automation software, you can set priority fences to ensure the SLA job has the highest priority for available computing resources. This way, the automation solution will automatically prevent other jobs from coming into the queue and taking up resources.
