Longtime readers know I'm a fanatic about service-level agreements. I regularly advise clients about SLA best practices, negotiation and enforcement strategies. And we talk often about how to develop service-level management and monitoring infrastructure that ensures that carriers live up to their promises. But all that's old school in a world where service providers are essentially just bandwidth providers. What happens as providers move from bandwidth providers to application providers? That is, when the service provider isn't just generating bits on a wire, but is delivering applications, storage and computing services from the cloud? A couple of things change in this new scenario. First, SLAs necessarily evolve from simple infrastructure metrics (latency, jitter, packet loss) to application-level metrics (application availability, response time).Second, monitoring and measurement needs to be far more comprehensive. Let's say you're relying on a hosting provider to deliver a key application.You should be able to track server availability, application performance, storage availability and network performance - not just router uptime. And if the application is hosted on a vir-tualized server, this can be mighty complex.
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