Many organizations use Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to define what they consider to be acceptable levels of IT service. PerformanceGuard helps you keep track of whether your organization's IT services live up to the agreed service levels. It works this way:

• Your PerformanceGuard administrator creates SLA items. They define what to look out for, how often to look, and the thresholds that determine success or failure
• PerformanceGuard then automatically runs the SLA items. In other words, PerformanceGuard automatically checks whether the defined services live up to the agreed service levels
• You can then view the SLA item results and include them in reports to management, service providers, consultants, etc. That's what we describe here.

View SLA Item Results

To view SLA item results, select REPORTING > SLA and then specify the following:

• SLA Item: Select required SLA item.

   What if I don't have any SLA items?

  In that case your PerformanceGuard administrator must set them up. See Manage SLA Items.

   What do the letters next to the SLA item names mean?

  Items marked (a) are active items; they look out for performance data from PerformanceGuard agents that actively contact specific servers at regular intervals to determine whether the servers are available, and how long it takes to get a reply from them. Items marked (p) are passive items; that is when PerformanceGuard passively waits for some computers to request something from a specified server/port combination and only collects performance data if requests are made. Items marked (t) are transaction items; they look out for performance data about web requests. Read more in Manage SLA Items.

• Interval: Select the period of time from which you want to view results. If, for example, you select the interval this week and the SLA item is calculated on a daily basis, seven rows will be shown, one for each day of the week (Sunday, Monday, ..., Saturday). If the predefined intervals don't suit you, select Custom to specify your own interval.

• Show all rows: Select this if you want to view all rows in the results table, even rows that contain no data.

  This can be useful if you are an administrator who has just set up new SLA items and want to verify that they work even though no data samples have been collected yet.

Click the Update button.
If a value is equal to or above a threshold, the row in question will be marked with a green sign . If a value is below a threshold, the row will be marked with a red sign .

Add SLA Item to Report

To add an SLA item to a report, follow the procedure described under View SLA Item Results in the previous and then expand the Advanced item that's located below the Update button.

You can then select the report that you want to add the selected SLA item to. Remember to click the Add to report button.