The Role of Service Management

The term service management generally refers to managing service level agreements. Implemented jointly by service providers and end user organizations, SLAs define the degree of service availability and response time – or “quality” -- of a given service both parties agree to accept.

Service Level Management is becoming more and more common place in SMEs and small corporates as end users demand more visibility and accountability for the IT services that they use and depend on. Service Level Management looks at the performance and availability of the IT infrastructure from a business perspective.

 Ensuring that a service is performing up to SLA expectations is the task of service management. Any task that is performed to ensure that a service meets expectations is part of the service management process. This involves such tasks as:

• Routine monitoring of the service
• Diagnosis of problems
• Generating reports to determine if a service is meeting expectations or not
• Planning the capacity of the infrastructure to ensure that the services will perform well in future
• Tracking the configurations of the infrastructure components to determine that they are optimally configured.

 The eG Enterprise Suite meets all of these requirements for end-to-end service management. Administrators have different options to measure service performance and availability. The measurements can be made by emulation of user activity and mouse clicks, or by observing a users working on their desktops. Metrics of service performance can also be collected from the front-end web servers and used to determine whether the service performance is within acceptable bounds.