One of the biggest challenges for today's IT professionals is regularly reinforcing the business value of IT activities to upper management. Translating technical details and obstacles into business speak requires a special acumen. Something that, for many, is only developed after years of doing it the wrong way before stumbling across a set of insights that help facilitate the transition. Routinely, it’s not that the inherent need for IT services is in question – that’s usually clear and substantial. Instead, it’s the inability to articulate the direct business impact of IT issues that create the perception of misalignment.

In an effort to bridge this gap, many IT managers are adopting a Service Level Agreement (SLA) model. This approach helps communicate IT activities in terms of business functions that people outside IT understand. Service level reporting helps translate technical challenges and results into the language that business owners speak. It provides executives and business process owners with meaningful data they can use to drive more productive business decisions. And it also pays big dividends for IT organizations – including the perception of being more vested in the business, access to bigger budgets, more funding for special IT projects, and added visibility across the company.

But if it was that easy and rewarding, why aren't more IT organizations doing it? One of the key challenges is that the tools IT managers commonly rely on often scale well for the back office but not for the front office. The tools themselves encourage a break/fix approach to IT by their very design. They provide a “bits and bytes” view of IT issues but lack the flexibility or breadth to map IT concerns to the higher order business processes they serve.

In a SLA model, IT has to be able to monitor the compliance of negotiated service levels. Administrators need a real-time view into a wide variety of infrastructure data points and their interoperability. Additionally, numerous considerations surround service availability (i.e., end-to-end service uptime) and overall quality (e.g., bandwidth, dropped connections, I/O, and so on). Finding the right set of integrated tools to deliver your SLA vision can be a daunting task.

For IT managers who want to make the transition, Dorado Software recently introduced new end-to-end monitoring tools designed to facilitate the change. Dorado Software's new Redcell OpsCenter 6.1 platform and Redcell Advanced Monitors (Redcell) add extensive monitoring capabilities that let you visualize, clarify and monitor IT resources and the network fabrics that bind them.

This paper explores these new capabilities and how they uniquely position Dorado Software customers for the benefits of an SLA-oriented management approach.