Why Is SLA Management Important for Automation?

Video Transcript

Years ago, you automated critical business processes to ensure that they run smoothly—improving efficiency, increasing resilience, and reducing operational costs.

Today's digital transformation means that integrations between on-premises, cloud-based, and SaaS applications are accelerating both in speed and frequency. This makes managing critical automation processes and maintaining acceptable service delivery increasingly difficult and even more critical.

Individual workload tasks can generate alerts when a milestone has been missed, a task has failed, or a job has run too long. While these alerts are useful, they can be fragmented in hybrid environments. Sure, there are defined owners and basic alerting capabilities, but there is no visibility, measurement, alerting, or understanding of the business process as a whole.

When you monitor independent jobs running across the enterprise, you can tie workload within multiple systems together as end-to-end business processes. Once this is achieved, you gain the ability to visualize, monitor, and measure automation processes so you can more effectively manage them.

These business processes can also be tracked as SLAs. Some may have contractual deadlines, while others may not, but in almost all cases, there is an acceptable performance level that must be tracked. Without the ability to manage, visualize, and measure critical automation processes, organizations risk operating without crucial insights. Operational costs increase while staff scramble to manage alert storms, trying to understand business impact and prioritize issue resolution.

Without SLA monitoring for business processes, organizations lack the ability to improve service delivery, analyze failures, adapt, optimize, and continuously improve.

In contrast, by defining and monitoring SLAs for workload and end-to-end automated business processes, organizations gain the ability to:

• Measure, analyze, and optimize past performance

• Monitor, alert, and take action in real-time

• Forecast and protect future operations

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