Lufthansa Systems gets SLAs under control

Lufthansa Systems gets SLAs under control


Oblicore software reports on process not infrastructure

Lufthansa Systems, the IT services arm of the German airline, is to cut the time taken to produce service level reports for its customers by up to 75 per cent.

The company provides IT services internally to Lufthansa's aviation divisions and externally to financial services firms. Lufthansa Systems has 750 service level agreements (SLAs) all of which demand a monthly report on provision levels.

Manually aggregating the data for these reports, compiled from various infrastructure consoles such as HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, Peregrine or Remedy, takes about 40 hours per month per SLA.

But Lufthansa Systems has recently implemented Oblicore Guarantee, reducing the time to eight to 10 hours per month per SLA.

Oblicore Guarantee monitors and reports in near real time on business process service levels rather than on the health of specific infrastructure components, such as servers, routers and switches.

It does this by automating and interpreting data feeds from disparate infrastructure monitors. When required, Guarantee can drill down via the infrastructure management consoles to examine individual components.

The accuracy and usefulness of Lufthansa's reports have increased as the time taken to produce them has decreased.

"We selected Guarantee after evaluating a number of competing applications because of its top-down, business centric approach to service delivery management," said Walter Isselhard, director of customer service support at Lufthansa Systems.

"This is very important because, when it comes to communicating SLA compliance, our customers need to know how well we lived up to our obligations in business terms that matter to them, not technical measures of speeds and feeds."

Microsoft systems consultancy Avanade warned recently that many SLAs have become pointless and no longer reflect the business process or IT infrastructure they supposedly govern.

Oblicore Guarantee can prevent this because it focuses on the business service and not on infrastructure components, according to Urs Hardekopf, manager for Germany, Austria and Switzerland at Oblicore.

"Guarantee starts by defining the service to be delivered, while [other monitoring products] start with infrastructure data and build the service from there," he said.

Guarantee is also used by German banking company ABN Amro, which has outsourced business processes to various service providers and uses Guarantee to manage the complexity.