SLA

It has always seemed to me that most IT monitoring and measuring tools are very self-serving. They look at the world from the internal IT silo perspective. In ITSM terms they are mildly interesting diagnostic tools for incident and problem resolution, but in terms of service level measurement the only really useful tools are the ones that measure the end user experience.

Some SLAs assign a key metric to how long IT is going to take to resolve incidents. Really. This is like firemen promising to put a fire out in ten minutes. Worse still if an SLA makes this mistake it almost always also has it the wrong way round.

Measuring a service as a black box is essential. Simply because it is impossible (in a practical sense) to discover and measure every link in a service chain, it is impossible to build a complete composite view of a service's performance bottom-up from the component CIs.

With the exception of outsourcers, IT departments are not a distinct business inside the business, and they should not behave like one. We are all on the same team, so we should be working in a spirit of trust and collaboration. SLAs introduce an adversarial formal negotiated relationship which is inappropriate when two units of the same organisation interact.