Taking ownership and oversight of SLAs

The migration to cloud services continues to be a priority for most enterprises. Services such as SaaS/IaaS/PaaS follow a similar trend of increased adoption across the digital world. These services have streamlined the effort and work that goes into infrastructure and network maintenance, helping companies save money.

Enterprises who have adopted cloud technologies or signed up for SaaS services entrust application performance to the service provider. This creates a false sense of security— a glaring blindspot that is usually overlooked until a major performance issue hits the application.

The current landscape

SaaS applications are an integral part of any enterprise. Employees use these applications to complete daily tasks and deliver projects. Management uses these tools to track and ensure employee productivity. Employees may use the corporate network, a VPN or an external network to access these services.

SaaS providers are bound by SLAs (Service Level Agreements) that address lapses in service delivery. The vendor guarantees attainable and measurable service performance. SLAs hold the vendor financially responsible for any service disruptions that impact the client’s end-users.

Enterprises put the onus of managing and delivering the service as promised on the vendor. But when there is an outage or a slow-down the client is left in the dark, unable to troubleshoot effectively and without any actionable performance data.

In these scenarios, validating an SLA breach can get tricky. When the client relies on employee feedback alone it may not be enough to troubleshoot/resolve the issue or to even help replicate intermittent issues.

The Google Cloud outage that happened two weeks ago is a good example of third-party dependency causing havoc if not monitored. The outage resulted in major SLA breaches that impacted businesses worldwide. Google is currently conducting an internal investigation and considering SLA credits to compensate customers.

Taking ownership

The modern breed of SaaS applications handle everything— sales, marketing, customer service, employee communication, collaboration, and more. With so many critical third-party services at play, it is easy to lose sight of performance.

Performance issues with SaaS applications can bring day-to-day operations to a halt and greatly hinder employee efficiency. The time spent analyzing, identifying, and fixing the issue is essentially unproductive man-hours.

Companies should have complete visibility into their work environment to maximize employee productivity. This includes the health of the intranet components, wide area networks, and all internal applications that employees use, including SaaS.

Trusting your vendor to alert you of an SLA breach and waiting for them to verify, troubleshoot, and compensate you for not upholding performance levels will eventually impact your business.

Rather than relying on the vendor to watch over SLAs, it is better to take ownership of performance. This gives your business much-needed visibility at every level of the application delivery chain.

Does SLA monitoring help?

Proactively monitoring applications is an important part of SLA management. All too often outages and performance degradation occurs but is under-reported. This is because enterprises are unable to get proactive alerts and don’t have the hard data to enforce contractual SLAs with vendors.

Implementing a neutral monitoring service gives you complete oversight of SLAs and provides unbiased, actionable, and shareable data. Employees working remotely or from different company locations will access SaaS applications over different network configurations. So, a basic monitoring strategy cannot serve this purpose because employee end-user experience is not exclusive to the company intranet.

So, considering all the variables in an enterprise environment, how do you accurately measure employee end-user experience?

Catchpoint’s Endpoint Monitoring was designed specifically to measure employee digital experience. Endpoint Monitoring combines a browser plug-in with a lightweight companion application. It gives detailed end-to-end view of every component in the network that the employee is connected to, measuring the performance of every application that the employee accesses.

The best of both worlds

Endpoint Monitoring combines RUM and active monitoring with device monitoring.

With the help of Endpoint Monitoring, you gain insight into the delivery chain, starting with the device itself, then through local networks and internet, and to applications, no matter who owns them.

Stay ahead of any service interruptions that may impact your business-critical infrastructure and software. SLA management is easier when you have the data needed to counter and verify breaches. Ensure vendors are delivering services without compromising performance.

Endpoing Monitoring gives you ownership of your application performance, so you can enforce SLAs, minimize downtime, and keep your employees productive.

In conclusion

Managing SLAs requires the right monitoring tools that ensure there is visibility at every level of the delivery chain. An outage or a slow SaaS application can impact employee efficiency. So, it’s necessary to guarantee optimum performance of SaaS applications.

SaaS monitoring from Catchpoint helps you track performance proactively and eliminates finger-pointing when SLA breaches occur. Endpoint Monitoring is another major edition to Catchpoint’s monitoring arsenal. Monitor everything from cloud and SaaS application to VPN and remote connectivity issues.

The performance data from Endpoint Monitoring will help you mitigate outages and quickly resolve performance bottlenecks. Most importantly, it gives you the hard data that is vital to maintaining SLAs.