The benefits of third-party monitoring for SLA enforcement

When Service Providers set up a service level agreement (SLA) with a new client, they have every intention of enforcing that agreement and ensuring they fulfill their network performance commitments.

However, performance degradations, downtime and outages are a fact of life, and service providers can’t always keep up with SLA enforcement when things go wrong. This can be detrimental to enterprise customers, whose business-critical applications need to perform reliably and consistently. It can also reflect poorly on the service provider whose reputation is on the line.

The result of these brownouts is reduced productivity and more time spent by IT departments trying to diagnose and fix performance degradations. Of those businesses experiencing daily brownouts, the research found that IT teams spent up to 12.5 hours a week troubleshooting issues that could have been avoided.

The best solution for SLA enforcement, for both enterprises and service providers, is third-party network and application performance monitoring (NAPM). This type of solutions provides a host of benefits to ensure key performance indicators (KPIs) and other important experience and quality metrics are being met consistently.

NAPM for SLA enforcement

One of the biggest benefits of using an NAPM solution is that it will typically provide visibility across the entire network architecture. This is essential for quickly diagnosing problems that could degrade business-critical application performance. Once the enterprise user understands where the pain point is, they may reach out to their service provider to fix the issue and enforce their SLA.

That was the case for California’s Farmers & Merchants (F&M) Bank, which was experiencing inconsistent performance on some of their mission-critical applications from various locations. The bank depends on its mobile banking app, as well videoconferencing, Citrix VDI and Oracle, and requires consistent, reliable performance. F&M suspected the problems were being caused by their broadband service, but neither the bank nor their service provider could effectively measure the performance degradation.

F&M deployed the Skylight solution, which provides them with powerful performance analytics about KPI and other performance metrics. They were then able to correlate, aggregate and visualize all performance data across their entire network architecture. That includes 25 offices, two service centers and two data centers. The bank now receives alerts about any performance anomalies or degradation, enabling them to pinpoint the problems and quickly resolve them with their broadband service provider. Most importantly, F&M was assured that their SLAs were being enforced properly.

“The level of insight we now have on a go-forward basis from Skylight, and the ability to detect issues as small as microbursts, gives us full confidence that we can maintain an exceptional level of service as we continue evolving with our transformation plans and the needs of our clients,” says Greg Sachs, senior vice president and chief technology officer for F&M.

“The insight Accedian provides into network health is extraordinary. For a recent high-profile meeting in which video was paramount, Accedian Skylight allowed us to know in advance and in real time that there would be no issues. If an issue comes up, we have full history and metrics including network jitter, bandwidth usage, and KPIs with minimum overhead.”

Greg Sachs, senior vice president and chief technology officer for Farmers & Merchants Bank

Third-party NAPM drives business value and ROI

NAPM solutions like Skylight work by placing sensors throughout the extended network architecture. These capture granular performance data, offering automated and intelligent insights about all network assets, from the customer premises to the data center to the cloud.

That performance data is critically important for enforcing SLAs, offering an immediate return on investment. It is also useful for improving enterprise service levels, which translates to improved customer and partner satisfaction.

Solutions such as Skylight also can include weekly Performance Monitoring-as-a-Service (PMaaS) to complement the overall offering. This includes regular meetings between the solution provider and enterprise to ensure continuous optimization of the offering.

Service providers also win in the end with third-party NAPM, since performance degradations and brownouts ultimately mean SLAs aren’t being fulfilled. That can lead to lost revenue, unhappy customers and even a loss of business.

SLA enforcement is a tricky business, and service providers and enterprises alike have much to lose when agreements aren’t consistently enforced. Beyond SLAs, performance degradations are unacceptable, particularly when they happen on a regular or even daily basis.

A holistic, third-party NAPM solution is a logical choice for ensuring SLA metrics are being regularly met while also quickly and efficiently identifying performance degradation pain points. The result is increased business value from consistent network performance, along with happier end users and customers.

Let us show you how you can ensure your SLA metrics are constantly being met and how you can deliver quality of experience. Get an in-depth demo of our NAPM solution today!