SLA Monitoring

[Adam Perkins]

Hey All,

Are there any good reads or recommendations on how to best monitor app availability for enterprise software bound by SLAs?  We currently have New Relic but pricing for our new infrastructure(8+ servers?) it will be cost prohibitive.

Also curious on the topic of what constitutes availability?  There may be various portions of the app which may or may not be available (ie a bug breaks some feature).

Any thoughts would be helpful.

Best

Adam

[Bradley Grzesiak]

Look at the Heroku addons list for monitoring as a place to start. I'd recommend looking into AppSignal.

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Bradley Grzesiak
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http://bendyworks.com/

[Jonathan Broad]

Hey,

I was on the Enterprise end of a lot of SLA negotiations in the last 10 years of my career, so that's where the following advice is coming from. YMMV. :)

For SLAs your best bet is to use external monitoring. Compuware (was Gomez), Keynote, Pingdom, and Site24x7 are a few tools I've used over the years. Not sure about current pricing on any of them, but Site24x7 and Pingdom are inexpensive IIRC.

Generally, availability doesn't include "planned downtime" so if you give adequate notice (define in the SLA!) it won't count against your nines.

You should define what parts of your service count as high availability vs stuff that might not be. Enterprises are usually pretty unconcerned about non-critical function availability (like reporting) but will be quite twitchy about anything in the critical path of making money. It behooves you to know how your software fits into the purchasing company's business model to be able to make this distinction meaningful.

Cheers,
Jonathan

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Jonathan Broad <jona...@outside-context.com>
Principal Instigator, Outside Context Solutions LLC

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