Service Quality Management Application

As throughout the services industry, service quality has also become a central issue for IT and telecommunications services. The emerging paradigm Service Quality Management (SQM) is focused on systems that help providers to implement quality services in an economical way. Both international analyst reports and NETvisor's own 9-year-long experience in this field indicate a significant and growing need for such solutions. Service quality has always been a traditional focus area for the company, and since 2004, we have turned our experience to developing the internationally unique PVSR Service Level Assurance Suite (PVSR-SLAS)

NETvisor PVSR-SLAS (formerly called PerformanceVisor SLA) is a system designed to consolidate, process, analyze and report on IT and telecommunications performance data. All this data comes from connected management systems, such as performance-monitoring tools, trouble ticketing systems or alarm management applications. PVSR-SLAS is thus an application with data-integration functionality.

The basic capability of SLAS is the comprehensive evaluation of service quality, which can be used either as proof of compliance with contract-based service level agreements (SLA-s), or simply for internal analysis. The system allows administrators to model quality requirements (subjective criteria, or requirements based on Key Performance Indicators, KPI-s defined by the Service Level Agreements) in an intuitive way, and continuously calculates the service level quality metrics on the basis of these models.

These SLAS-based results have multiple possible uses:

• The primary use is the generation of complete ready-to-publish SLA report documents (in HTML, PDF or XML formats), sent via email or posted on the Web. These reports may be created on-demand, i.e. based on user commands on the web GUI, or in a fully automatic, scheduled mode (e.g. monthly SLA reports).
• The Web GUI also makes it possible to visualize the trends of SLA compliance results, and trace back occasional problems, down to the level of individual measurements or trouble records.
• PVSR-SLAS results can also be displayed in configurable portlets (windows on a portal server), making the creation of attractive, easy-to-access and informative executive consoles ("SLA dashboards") possible.
• In addition to current SLA results, PVSR-SLAS also allows for trend analysis. This longer-term overview data can be well utilized for capacity-planning, identifying the need for technical or organizational reforms, or a retrospective evaluation of such changes.

PVSR-SLAS is fully Web-based and built upon the most recent software technologies (J2EE, Web Services, SOA, and AJAX), making the design future-proof and open to further improvements. The efficient and reliable storage of SLAS's large amount of measurement data, however, is guaranteed by the underlying robust Oracle database layer.

PVSR-SLAS comes with open interfaces that allow for easy integration with other IT and telecommunication management systems.