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. Essentials provides the capability to monitor these service goals through the use of service level tracking.
In Essentials, 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: