SAS® IT Service Level Management
SAS IT Service Level Management provides service-delivery management across business units. The solution documents IT services consumed by line-of-business users, as well as the agreed upon availability, response time and throughput for those services. The SAS IT Service Level Management data warehouse provides a context-rich environment for IT data metrics, services, performance expectations, service providers and consumers, and line-of-business contracts for services.
Benefits
- Demonstrate the value of IT performance.
- Communicate between lines of business and IT organizations.
- Determine effectiveness and efficiency.
- Fuel continuous quality improvement.
- Integrate with ITIL best practices.
Features
- Service Level Contract Management
- Service Level Agreement and Objective Management
- Service Level Management Processing
- ITIL-compliant catalog of IT services
- Predefined contract templates for quicker entry of IT service contract information
- A flexible hierarchical structure of contracts, agreements and objectives that accommodates complex levels of service deliverables
- Automated capabilities
“In order to provide the best possible service to our customers, we must constantly monitor all our measurement data. Using SAS, we can create valuable service level reports in a very short period of time, which benefits both us and our customers.”
—Norbert Herting
Senior Specialist, Service Reporting
Vodafone
Screenshots
SAS IT Service Level Management quickly pinpoints missed service targets and helps you drive continuous quality improvements.
How SAS® Is Different
- Leverages SAS analytics (for example, statistical and forecasting measures) to monitor quality of service, service delivery process and fault management, thus ensuring alignment of the IT organization with overall business objectives.
- Tightly integrated with SAS IT Resource Management to deliver analysis and reporting to understand and resolve IT component deficiencies that lead to service degradations.
Benefits
- Demonstrate the value of IT performance. Armed with a hierarchical framework for measuring and monitoring performance of IT services, corporate managers can be sure that IT professionals will deliver the services most critical to the organization, continually measure IT’s strategic contribution and identify areas for improvement.
- Communicate between lines of business and IT organizations. SAS communicates line-of-business IT consumption and service quality, which helps establish accurate perceptions – and expectations – of IT throughout the enterprise. The solution also facilitates more detailed understanding of the value associated with IT services, resources and service delivery.
- Determine effectiveness and efficiency. By documenting business requirements for IT through service level agreements, SAS measures performance to drive future enhancements. SAS IT Service Level Management can read and analyze virtually any data format, allowing the solution to adapt to a company's current infrastructure and grow with the organization.
- Fuel continuous quality improvement. SAS IT Service Level Management's documentation and reporting capabilities enable corporate executives to maintain a constant flow of information that fuels continuous quality improvement.
- Integrate with ITIL best practices. Built with ITIL best practices in mind, SAS IT Service Level Management allows IT services be organized into catalogs, communicated in contract agreements, measured and reported against objectives and actively managed to meet those objectives.
Features
- Service Level Contract Management
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- Uses an ITIL-compliant catalog of IT services to align IT services to lines of business.
- Predefined contract templates quicker entry of IT service contract information.
- Service, people, and resource catalogs allow objects to be referenced or "pulled" to quickly and easily create new service contracts.
- A people catalog with customer, provider and contact objects provides easy operational reference access.
- A Contracts View is provided for the purposes of managing and viewing Service Contract status.
- A flexible hierarchical structure of contracts, agreements and objectives accommodates complex levels of service deliverables.
- Service Level Agreement and Objective Management
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- Analytical agreement and objective methods (mean, sum, minimum, maximum and faultmanagement – serial and redundant) allow the IT organization to structure reports for various purposes in a business-oriented context.
- Range-sets accommodate Service Level Objectives (SLOs) measured via high and low threshold boundaries.
- Composite objectives allow the rollup of dissimilar SLO calculations to higher level nodes to provide a unified score at the higher level.
- A complete audit trail of changes to IT environmental objects is maintained in accordance with ITIL.
- All service related objects are flexibly grouped in folders for organizational purposes.
- Service Level Management Processing
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- A data view provides complete IT data exploration.
- Custom API calls provide special data analysis and reporting.
- Summary statistics span time periods to measure any aspect of the service delivery process and support strategic service level management
- SAS IT Service Level Management incorporates planned and unplanned outage information into the service measurements.
- ITIL-compliant catalog of IT services
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- IT services can include support for physical and virtual computer systems, networks, applications, storage, telephones, fax machines, Web pages, etc.
- A service is also a node in the contract hierarchy that organizes other service nodes and component nodes in the hierarchy.
- Service catalog contains, for each service:
- Service description.
- Timeframes for fulfilling the service.
- Identification of who provides, consume the service.
- Cost of service (if any); cost of non-compliance.
- Details on how service is to be provided.
- A Contracts View is provided for the purposes of managing and viewing Service Contract status.
- Predefined contract templates for quicker entry of IT service contract information
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- Access IT performance data:
- Availability.
- Performance.
- Response time.
- Transaction volume.
- Business application metrics.
- Key performance indicators.
- Other: Scoring, composite, range sets, serial and redundant fault management, custom, constraints, weighting.
- Define all the measurable nodes – components, services, and SLAs – that make up a contract.
- Designate service level objectives for each node.
- Select your preferred methods of processing and evaluating the data.
- Access IT performance data:
- A flexible hierarchical structure of contracts, agreements and objectives that accommodates complex levels of service deliverables
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- Contract node is highest-level.
- SLA node represents an agreement between IT provider and customer that defines the services that are provided, the metrics that are associated with these services, and acceptable and unacceptable service levels.
- Service node represents one or more of the IT systems that typically enable a business process to function.
- Component nodes usually represent tangible IT hardware and software assets, such as a Web server or disk farm.
- Automated capabilities
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- Alarming based on thresholds.
- Automated reporting.
- Wizards/templates for deployment.
Screenshots
The ability to quickly pinpoint missed service targets helps you drive continuous quality improvements to keep internal customers productive. Here, the missed response times (highlighted in red) for a marketing automation application provide an immediate, compelling case for improvement, which, if acted upon (using the solution’s fault analysis capabilities), might prevent future helpdesk calls.
System Requirements
SAS IT Service Level Management Server
- AIX: Release 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 on POWER
- HP-UX PA-RISC: Release 11i Version 1, 2 and 3
- HP-UX Itanium: Release 11i Version 1, 2 and 3
- Linux for Intel (x86-32): Red Hat Linux 8.0, RHAS 2.1, RHEL 3.0 and 4.0, SuSE SLES 8 and 9
- Solaris on SPARC: Version 8, 9, 10 on SPARC
- Windows (x86-32): Windows NT 4 Server, Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003
- Windows (on Itanium): Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based systems
- z/OS, Version 1 and higher
SAS IT Service Level Management Client
- Windows (x86-32): Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional
- Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6
SAS IT Service Level Management Required Software
The SAS IT Service Level Management client runs on a Windows PC and uses JConnect software to communicate with the server. JConnect requires a connection to the server via either Telnet or a SAS/CONNECT Spawner that is running on the server listening for client connections.
The SAS IT Service Level Management server must contain Base SAS Software, SAS IT Resource Management 2.7 software (through consulting services, this solution can be instrumented to accommodate SAS IT Resource Management 3.1.1 IT data marts), and SAS IT Service Level Management server software and may run on a Windows, UNIX, or z/OS operating system. Environment and Contract Databases used by SAS IT Service Level Management must be accessible to the file system used by the server platform. Data Source PDBs that are used for input data to SAS IT Service Level Management may either reside on the server platform or reside on a platform remote to the server.
Ready to learn more?
Call us at 1-800-727-0025 (US and Canada) or request more information.
