Service Level Dashboard for System Center Operations Manager 2007

Published: March 27, 2009   |   Updated: May 21, 2009

Download This Solution Accelerator

Click here to download Version 2.0 of the Service Level Dashboard 2.0 for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

Note   The previous release of Service Level Dashboard is also still available as a release on the Microsoft Download Center. 

Click here to download the previous version of Service Level Dashboard.

About This Solution Accelerator

The Service Level Dashboard addresses the need for organizations to ensure that their business-critical IT resources (applications and systems) are available and performing at acceptable levels. The dashboard evaluates an application or group over a selected time period, determines whether it met the defined service level commitment, and displays summarized data. 

The Challenge for IT

Business groups commonly depend on IT to manage the line-of-business (LOB) applications they use. For IT managers and administrators, the monitoring, managing, and reporting work required to meet established availability and performance goals for these applications can be challenging. Although IT departments have ever more sophisticated monitoring tools at their disposal, these tools follow traditional monitoring, which is server-based. As long as the server is in good health, the assumption is that the service is good too.

The performance and availability attributes of the service cannot be measured in just one place, however. Differences in network speed and quality across the company can slow or break functionality for the end user. Furthermore, multiple server and client software components are often combined to provide a service and can each affect its quality. Thus a true picture of the performance and availability of an application can only come from evaluating these attributes from an end-to-end perspective.

IT managers describe their challenge in words such as these:

Our organization is geographically dispersed and we use many common Web-based applications to run critical aspects of our business. The constant availability and performance of these applications has a direct impact on our bottom line. We want to be proactive in securing the performance and availability of these applications and not wait until help desk gets a call from an end user.

Business Scenarios

The Service Level Dashboard can be used to improve the ability of administrative personnel, ranging from IT support to the Executive Office, to work with technology-driven services. This Solution Accelerator can help in business scenarios such as these: 

• You need to determine the overall level of SLA compliance of your business-critical applications and identify those that are out of compliance so that you can assess the management actions that need to be taken.
• Government regulations dictate that certain applications in your business stay compliant with the SLAs and you need up-to-date, real-time reports that can help your business do this.
• You need to be able to quickly identify applications that have performance or availability problems, as well as possible causes of the problems.
• Budget constraints prevent you from hiring additional resources, but you need to measure and validate the availability and performance of your business-critical applications against their respective SLAs.
• Senior management is asking for current SLA compliance information and you need to have summary information at your fingertips.
• You’re looking for a service level management solution that leverages your existing Operations Manager infrastructure because you don’t want to invest in another comprehensive solution.
• You want to be able to test various user experience scenarios so you can identify performance bottlenecks before they cause major business impacts.
• You need visibility into how end-users experience your LOB applications.

Addressing the Challenge

The Service Level Dashboard provides a way for managers, application owners, and IT professionals to monitor the availability and performance of business-critical applications and to view the reported data on a single web-based interface. The dashboard identifies any shortfalls between service goals and actual performance, helping IT to quickly become aware of problems.

Details of Version 2.0 vs. Version 1.1

Although version 2.0 and earlier versions of the Service Level Dashboard all provide these benefits, they have different requirements, and version 2.0 offers new features.

To read an overview of Service Level Dashboard 2.0 that explains its requirements, new features, and how it works, see Version 2.0 Overview.

To read an overview of version 1.1 of the Service Level Dashboard that explains the requirements and how it works, see Version 1.1 Overview.

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