Service Level Management

Monitoring

The service level monitoring process is essential if you want to progressively improve the quality of the service offered, its return on investment and the satisfaction of customers and users.

Monitoring the quality of service requires monitoring of the organisation's procedures and internal parameters and those relating to users' perceptions.

To carry out this task efficiently it is necessary to have established a scale of quality of service that can be used when preparing the relevant reports.

The main sources of information are:

• The available documentation: SLAs, OLAs, UCs, etc.
• Incident Management which is responsible for reporting incidents affecting the service and the recovery time.
• Service Capacity and Availability Management: which is responsible for providing information on the infrastructure used to achieve the agreed quality of service.
• The Service Desk: which supervises the quality of service and knows about the customer's perception of the service quality from its daily dealings with customers, users and the IT organisation.

The performance reports prepared must cover key factors such as:

• Compliance with SLAs, with information about the frequency and impact of the incidents responsible for degradation of service.
• Complaints, whether justified or not, from customers and users.
• Use of the predefined capacity.
• Service availability.
• Response times.
• The real costs of the service offered.
• Problems detected and changes made to restore the quality of service.
• Quality of service of external service providers: level of compliance with the OLAs.