One of the challenges facing businesses is ensuring that resources, such as applications and systems, are available and performing at acceptable levels. To assure this, companies set goals for their service availability and response times. Operations Manager 2007 R2 provides the capability to monitor these service goals through the use of service level tracking.

In Operations Manager 2007 R2, you define your service goals (referred to as, service level objectives) and then generate reports that show how your resources have performed against those goals. Using the information from these reports, you can identify any shortfalls between your service goals and your actual performance. This means that you are not only aware of problems but also can track the relative business effect of these problems.

For example, if you have a group of servers running instances of Microsoft Exchange Server, which are critical to your internal e-mail network, you can define a service level objective that states that 95% of the servers must be available at all times. Then you can generate a report that compares the actual availability of those servers against the service level objective.

Tracking service level objectives involves the following steps:

1. Define the objectives that you want to track for an application.
   
   
2. Define the objectives that you want to track for a group.
   
   
3. Run a report that reflects the status of the service level objectives.
   
   

For detailed instructions on how to define the objectives and run service level reports, see the Using Operations Manager 2007 Guide.