Bulletproof network assurance with service provider SLAs

A company that has undergone digital transformation can be successful only with stable connectivity and a high-performing network. Downtime and outages are a fact of life, however, and service providers aren’t always able to uphold the promises they make in their service-level agreements (SLAs). 

When an enterprise encounters performance degradations, time delays and finger-pointing between teams can create chaos. Is the problem at the service provider’s end, or is it somewhere else? Either way, business-critical applications need to perform, or else the reputations of both the customer organization and the service provider are at risk. With a supply chain of angry customers.

Are you getting the level of service you paid for? 

As many as 40 percent of U.S. companies experience network brownouts several times a week, with one in five of those events happening daily, according to recent Accedian research. Nearly two-thirds (60 percent) say they have endured increased end-user complaints as a result. Productivity is declining and IT departments are spending as much as 12.5 hours a week trying to diagnose and fix network performance issues.  

An SLA is supposed to help uphold a service provider’s promise to meet customers’ expectations for network performance, and most providers strive to ensure that they fulfill their performance commitment.

Unfortunately, they don’t always succeed. These types of problems can lead to overprovisioning and higher costs.

3 things to do to ensure service providers are meeting their network SLAs

A performance-based SLA helps keep service providers accountable and builds trust with the customer when the expectations are met—and outlines what penalties the provider will face if SLA assurance fails. 

It’s easy to sign an SLA and then forget about it, particularly when inboxes are already flooded with paperwork. IT can’t afford to ignore the SLA assurance they receive, though. 

1 – Get a good lawyer

SLAs, like most legal documents, can be difficult to understand clearly. Legalese is boring and full of jargon. It’s essential to have visibility into your provider’s promises, however, because IT teams are increasingly dependent on their service provider to keep network performance at a high enough quality that apps run smoothly for users. Get support from your corporate legal team or a lawyer to make sure you understand the terms and get advice on how you will be able to enforce that your SLAs are met or that you can recover costs.

2 – Get Granular

For example, network polling cycles usually aren’t constant or instant; rather, intervals are about one or two minutes for ping checks and about five minutes for data collection. That means that network degradations can elude capture by monitoring software. For this reason, SLAs should define the granularity required for measuring downtime—and that granularity should be in seconds, not minutes. Otherwise, a provider could have service interruptions lasting as long as 35 seconds in every minute and still be able to say the service was performing satisfactorily.

Sometimes service providers claim high SLA numbers but provide customers with an SLA that lists a considerable range of numbers that do not provide any real value to the customer. 

3 – Get Real-time data

Most service providers require customers to measure network performance on their own and provide data to prove an SLA violation has occurred—they don’t want the burden of providing real-time measurements of uptime themselves. To ensure you’re getting the service the SLA promised, it’s a good idea to demand real-time reports for validation.

End-to-end network visibility benefits both SLA parties

Even if you understand the promises made to you in your SLA, it’s not always easy to determine whether the service provider is upholding those promises. SLA metrics might include things like reliability, performance benchmarks, applications response, and time between failures or time to resolution. But how do you gain visibility into your network to see whether these key performance indicators are being satisfied? 

Third-party network and application performance monitoring (NAPM) is the best solution for SLA assurance. NAPM involves placing sensors throughout the extended network architecture to capture granular performance data. This provides network visibility across the entire network so that problems that could hinder application performance can be diagnosed quickly. 

NAPM solutions provide automated and intelligent insights from all the areas of the network, from the customer’s premises all the way to the cloud. Issues that arise can be shared with the service provider so pain points can be fixed.  

This benefits both the user and their service provider. Performance degradations and brownouts can erode trust, because they mean the SLA isn’t being upheld, and a service provider stands to lose business if it has unhappy customers.

Bulletproof SLAs with the proper tools 

Your SLA is a working document designed to protect your business-critical applications and end-user experience. It’s critical to understand what the provider is promising (and without caveats), how delivery and downtime are measured, what happens if service fails, and the penalties for nonconformance. 

It’s not always easy to enforce SLAs, especially when digital transformation keeps IT busy with so many other challenges to tackle. But both parties stand to lose if the agreement fails. 

How to get your money back

If the provider isn’t meeting their SLA assurance terms, penalties in the SLA should be significant. After all, performance degradations and brownouts can lead to lowered productivity and, worse, business loss. The service provider should be held responsible financially for this kind of pain. At the very least, they should allow you to break your contract easily if SLA benchmarks are missed a certain number of times.

A third-party NAPM solution is a great way to keep a service provider honest and ensure that SLA metrics are being met consistently. NAPM offers the kind of network visibility that is critical for quickly and efficiently identifying performance issues. 

Accedian Skylight uses built-in data analysis and intelligent machine learning capabilities to monitor services in near real-time for performance, reliability, and precision. This kind of visibility allows issues to be identified and resolved quickly. Learn more about how our solution benefits SLAs and keeps everyone on the same page.