1. Cloud Control Administrator's Guide
  2. Administering Cloud Control
  3. Configuring and Using Services
  4. Configuring Service Levels

Configuring Service Levels

A service level rule is defined as an assessment criteria used to determine service quality. It allows you to specify availability and performance criteria that your service must meet during business hours as defined in your Service Level Agreement. For example, e-mail service must be 99.99% available between 8am and 8pm, Monday through Friday.

A service level rule specifies the percentage of time a service meets the performance and availability criteria as defined in the Service Level Rule. By default, a service is expected to meet the specified criteria 85% of the time during defined business hours. You may raise or lower this percentage level according to service expectations. A service level rule is based on the following:

  • Business Hours: Time range during which the service level should be calculated as specified in your Service Level Agreement.

  • Availability: Allows you to specify when the service should be considered available. This will only affect the service level calculations and not the actual availability state displayed in the console. You can choose a service to be considered up when it is one or more of the following states:

    • Up: By default the service is considered to be Up or available.

    • Under Blackout: This option allows you to specify service blackout time (planned activity that renders the service as technically unavailable) as available service time.

    • Unknown: This option allows you to specify time that a service is unmonitored because the Management Agent is unavailable be counted as available service time.

  • Performance Criteria: You can optionally designate poor performance of a service as a Service Level violation. For example, if your Website is up, but it takes 10 seconds to load a single page, your service may be considered unavailable.

  • Business Criteria: Business criteria are useful in determining in the health of the business processes for a particular service. You can optionally define business metrics that can affect the Service Level. A Service Level violation occurs when a critical alert is generated for a specified business metric.

    Note:

    The Business Criteria column is displayed only if one or more key business indicators are associated with the service. Refer to the Oracle Enterprise Manager Integration Guide.

  • Actual Service Level: This is calculated as percentage of time during business hours that your service meets the specified availability, performance, and business criteria.

  • Expected Service Level: Denotes a minimum acceptable service level that your service must meet over any relevant evaluation period.

You can define only one service level rule for each service. The service level rule will be used to evaluate the Actual Service Level over a time period and compare it against the Expected Service Level.

Defining Service Level Rules

A Service Level Rule is defined as assessment criteria to measure Service quality. A Service Level Rule is based on the following:

  • Time range for which the rule is applicable.

  • Metrics that define the rule.

  • The user expectation on these metrics values

The Expected Service Level is the expected quality for the service and is defined based on the time range and metrics of the Service Level Rule. For example, the Expected Service Level can be that the service is available 99% of the time during business hours.

When you create a service, the default service rule is applied to the service. However, you must edit the service level rule for each service to accurately define the assessment criteria that is appropriate for your service. To define a service level rule:

  1. Click the Targets tab and Services subtab. The Services main page is displayed.
  2. Click the service name link to go to the Service Home page.
  3. In the Related Links section, click Edit Service Level Rule.
  4. On the Edit Service Level Rule page, specify the expected service level and the actual service level and click OK. The expected service level specifies the percentage of time a service meets the performance, usage, availability, and business criteria defined in the Service Level Rule. The actual service level defines the baseline criteria used to define service quality and includes business hours, availability, performance criteria, usage criteria, and business criteria.

Note:

Any Super Administrator, owner of the service, or Enterprise Manager administrator with OPERATOR_TARGET target privileges can define or update the Service Level Rule.

Viewing Service Level Details

You can view service level information directly from the either of the following:

  • Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Console -From any Service Home page, you can click on the Actual Service Level to drill down to the Service Level Details page. This page displays what Actual Service Level is achieved by the service over the last 24 hours/ 7 days / 31 days, compared to the Expected Service Level. In addition, details on service violation and time of each violation are presented in both graphical and textual formats.

  • Information Publisher - Information Publisher provides an out-of-box report definition called the Services Dashboard that provides a comprehensive view of any service. From the Report Definition page, click on the Services Monitoring Dashboard report definition to generate a comprehensive view of an existing service. By default, the availability, performance, status, usage, business, and Service Level of the service are displayed. The Information Publisher also provides service-specific report elements that allow you to create your own custom report definitions. The following report elements are available:

    • Service Level Details: Displays Actual Service Level achieved over a time-period and violations that affected it.

    • Service Level Summary: Displays service level violations that occurred over selected time-period for a set of services.

    • Services Monitoring Dashboard: Displays status, performance, usage, business, and service level information for a set of services.

    • Services Status Summary: Information on one or more services' current status, performance, usage, business, and component statuses.

      Refer to the Online Help for more details on the report elements.