1.1.3 Supporting creation of reports required for periodic reporting

A service provider must check the quality of its services periodically, even if there are no abnormalities in service status. Especially when a service provider outsources the management and operation of its business systems to a data center and provides its services from the data center to its service users, the data center must be requested to report the service status periodically to the service provider in some form, such as reports.

If you use ITSLM, you can display service monitoring results for any specified period. You can select the items to be displayed as appropriate to the circumstances and you can save selected information as templates. You can also output monitoring results as CSV files. All this reduces the time required for performing periodic checking and creating reports, thereby achieving efficient service management and operation.

The following figure shows an example of a report displayed by ITSLM.

Figure 1‒7: Example of a report displayed by ITSLM

For the services being monitored, this report displays the monitoring results for a period of one month, starting on November 1, 2012, for three items: the average response time, throughput, and error rate.

For example, from the table at the top, which displays the average value, the SLO compliance rate, and the previous month VS for each monitored item, you can conclude that the services were provided to users in November 2012 and that the service level was maintained because the SLO compliance rate was 100%. The change on one of the graphs (the graph that shows an upward trend) can be used to determine that whether the system needs to be enhanced.

You can display reports by service and also by service process.

Example of periodic evaluation of monitored services

This subsection explains an example that evaluates the need for system enhancement by assessing periodically whether the service level is being maintained.

The following figure shows the general procedure for using ITSLM to check and evaluate the service level.

Figure 1‒8: General procedure for using ITSLM to check and evaluate the service level

On April 1, 2012, use of ITSLM to monitor service status began. Since then, the service level has been checked for any problems at the end of each week.

On April 8, 2012, no problems were seen, but a week later on April 15, 2012, monitoring detects a decrease in the service level, based on the trend shown on a graph of the monitoring results. On April 29, 2012, the last evaluation for the month, it becomes clear that the service level tends to drop toward the end of the month. As a result, the monitoring person who is using ITSLM evaluates whether some sort of system enhancement might be called for in order to increase the service users' sense of satisfaction.

As shown in this example, you can use ITSLM for periodic evaluation of service level and then use the monitoring results to improve the service users' sense of satisfaction.

For this example, an example of setting up the monitored items is explained in 3.3.4 Example of setup for periodic evaluation of the status of monitored services, and an example of execution of monitoring is explained in 4.6.4 Example of execution for periodic evaluation of the status of monitored services.

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