How to Calculate Availability using the SLM Module¶
In this how-to, you will learn how to set up an availability report using SLA types in the Service Level Management (SLM) module. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a contract between your company and a customer. If you offer similar SLAs to multiple customers, the standard elements of the agreement should be separated from the customers’ data: the SLM module makes this separation explicit during the configuration phase.
The following scenario will be used as guidance throughout the howto. Suppose that for your company (called ACME) you need to monitor the availability of services on three hosts of your network (acme_linux_01,acme_linux_02, and acme_windows_01) and make sure that those services are available 99.9% of the time during working hours (9AM to 5PM, or 9:00-17:00) from Monday to Friday, measured weekly.
There are three elements in the SLM module that you need to configure:
SLA Type: Basic SLA information that can be reused across many customers
Customer: A table of customers and of their data
Contract: The pairing of a customer and an SLA type for a specific set of monitored objects
In a nutshell. In order to create a SLA, the first step is to define the Time Period needed in the Director, then use that Time Period to set up one type of SLA Type, add customers data, and finally define the Contract.
Step #1: Configure a Time Period¶
Follow the menu and click on Add. Since the scenario defined above requires availability during working hours, create one Time Period and call it Working Hours (use the same for the Display Name field).
In this howto, the other fields will not be covered, so go ahead and click on Add at the bottom of the form.
Now move to the Ranges tab and add the five days of the week and hours for each like this:
Day(s) |
Timeperiods |
|---|---|
Monday |
09:00-17:00 |
Tuesday |
09:00-17:00 |
Wednesday |
09:00-17:00 |
Thursday |
09:00-17:00 |
Friday |
09:00-17:00 |
When done, you will need to deploy the new time period in Director ().
Step #2: Configure an SLA Type¶
You can now go to the SLM module. After clicking on the SLM menu entry you should see a list of any SLA types you have already defined. Let’s create a new SLA type that fulfils the required criteria by clicking on Add. Enter a name, such as Working Hours by Week, and a description.
Next, select the time period defined in Step #1 from the Time Period drop-down. Then select Weekly from the Calculation Period drop-down, since the availability is measured per week, Finally, enter the target availability (99.9% in our case) and click on the Store button. You’ve now created an SLA type that you can later reuse across multiple customers.
Step #3: Add a Customer¶
Next you need to create a Customer. Switch to the Customers tab, where you will see a list of existing customers. Let’s add a new one, say Acme, S.p.A., along with a short description.
That’s it for this tab! Store the data and let’s go to the next step.
Step #4: Add a Contract¶
Now you need to link an SLA type to the customer and specify which hosts and services are covered in the SLA.
Go to the Contracts tab and click on the Add action. Enter a name like Acme Weekly Availability and a description. From the Customer drop-down, choose the Acme, S.p.A. customer and then from the SLA Type drop-down choose Working Hours by Week, as defined in Step #2.
All that’s left for configuration is to define the set of monitored objects. These are specified by using a filtering expression. In our scenario, you can use the following filtering expression, as long as no other host names begin with the string “acme”:
host_name=acme*
When done, click on the Store button to save the configuration.
Step #5: Create the Availability Report¶
You are almost done: Once the SLA contract is set up, you can create and print an availability report on demand. Follow the instructions to create a report, making sure to set the report type to SLM Report and the customer to Acme, S.p.A..
The monitoring data needed to detail availability will be automatically calculated and then imported for all SLA contracts defined in Step #4 for that customer.
