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Service Level Accounting
SLA generally refers to the Service Level Agreement made between the IT which provides application services, and the user department or organization to whom those services are provided.  IT needs to account for the level of service provided and report services delivered against commitments.  We call that Service Level Accounting.  We believe that essentially all well run IBM mainframe shops running z/OS use SMF and other data to track and report on things like:
  • Batch job completion and resource usage (from SMF 34/35 records).
  • CICS transaction volumes, response time and resource usage, for specific applications and to individual groups of users (from SMF 110 records).
  • etc.

And many IBM mainframe shops put this data into CA-MICS®, or MXG® or maybe even IBM® tools like CICS® Performance Analyzer for z/OS.  What do these same customers do after they move these applications to a mainframe alternative system?

IT management needs that data to answer key questions such as:

  1. What level of online application services was provided to end users?
  2. What is the service level trend over time, i.e., is service getting better or worse?
  3. How much of my computing capacity is being used and by which applications, activities or end user departments?  How is this usage changing over time?

 


SLA on a Mainframe Alternative System

zTOx believes that customers who have moved to a mainframe alternative need to continue to collect data about and report on service delivered and service levels achieved, the system activity/utilization and the application resource usage supporting that service.


This is an area were standardization could benefit the community of vendors that support migration to mainframe alternatives, as well as the users of those solutions. 


An MFA Community Standard 
The IBM mainframe migration vendor community would benefit from the existence of tools/products that provided this data management and reporting in a manner that is familiar to the reporting they had on z/OS.  Migration vendors need a good answer to the customer question: “If I move to your mainframe alternative solution, what am I going to do about service level tracking and reporting and long term accounting for resource usage”?
 
What SLA solutions do you believe are used today by IT shops that have moved applications from an IBM mainframe system to a mainframe alternative?  Let us know.
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