By Novell Guest Blog 2

novell operations center

As the old saying goes, you can only manage what you can measure. In fact, the whole concept of a service level agreement is moot without the ability to monitor, measure and report on availability and other performance metrics. As workload processing works its way onto into the public cloud, SLAs become even more critical. Your ability to help customers monitor, measure and manage their workloads—whether they reside on the customers’ premises or on a third party’s—becomes a must-have capability.

How SLAs will measure up in the cloud is a big debate right now—as it should be. I recently read an article titled Time to Lay Down the Cloud Computing Law for Uptime, by Laura Smith. The article raised some good points about cloud computing SLAs, the need for vendors to define “uptime,” and the fact that no cloud computing laws exist to govern liability for service interruptions. There’s much work to be done here—but monitoring, measuring and reporting on the performance of far-flung datacenters is the key to truly knowing if a service is meeting expectations. Whether you are helping customers move into the cloud, or providing cloud-based services yourself, measurement becomes a critical capability.

Getting Started

The tools to monitor, measure and report on workloads already exist—however, they need further integration into cloud-friendly packages. Trust me when I say the last thing customers want to buy is yet another one. What they really need is digital glue that bonds all of these tools together.

I’m only aware of one product that does this. And yes, I work for the company that developed it: Novell Operations Center (NOC) is proving to be beneficial for VARs who are helping customers move toward intelligent workload management. It’s an integration engine that masks complexity in heterogeneous environments to provide an end-to-end view of an IT service—even services that are delivered over the cloud. The real differentiator is that it provides “live” reporting, which gives you the ability to take action before a service impacting event.

That’s the kind of tangible value customers are looking for these days—measuring and managing business services and ensuring service-level compliance while keeping line of business managers informed. I’d suggest that you test drive Novell Operations Center and see how it measures up against competitive offerings. If you find something that works this well, I’d like to hear about it.

dan dufault novell

Dan Dufault is global director of partner marketing at Novell. Guest blogs such as this one are part of The VAR Guy’s annual sponsorship program. Read all of Dufault’s guest blogs here.