SLA reporting on services (“service” in the ITIL/MOF world is a service we provide to a customer/user, not a windows service) is critical in a service industry. More businesses view their internal IT as a service. Those of us in the hosting industry are fully aware of the contractual importance of the SLA.
OpsMgr 2007 can gather health/performance information on a “service” using a Distributed Application. A DA assembles components, e.g. websites, SQL databases, network devices, etc in a “service” that you can alert on when it’s offline, e.g. a SQL DB in a DA going offline would bring down the customer service and thus be reflected in the status of the DA. OpsMgr 2007 R2 can even include a hybrid of Windows, Linux and UNIX components into a single DA, e.g. a firewall running on Solaris, a MySQL database running on RedHat and a web server running on Windows.
With all this health, performance and availability information that we can store in the Reporting Database, we can generate reports and consoles for SLA reporting. The SLA 2.0 console for OpsMgr 2007 R2 enables this.
It’s a free download so give it a look-see in your lab. You can learn more about it here.