When starting a new company or a new organization we need to do everything from scratch and out of the many things the important one is Network audit plan. The first thing is to do network audit checklist and the checklist contains server operating system(OS) and version, Tape backup and version, Tech support contact & Number, Workstation OS and version, ISP, Tech support contract & number. The network audit helps to assist management, collects the hardware and software from the remote computers and report application. Within few seconds you can get hardware and software in each computer. It discovers the entire network from different layers and provides browsing query's and report facilities that enable us to keep track of changes of the network.
Network Inventory audits all network software and hardware simply and efficiently. It automatically discovers all your network assets, scans them and builds ready-to-use network inventory reports. It helps you control and reduce your IT costs with automated agent-free network inventory. With Network Inventory Advisor you will easily track all hardware changes, audit software licenses and collect invaluable network data. With our high-end network inventory software you can manage Windows, Mac OS, Linux nodes and other network devices in one place.
Network software inventory and licenses compliance audit are the key features of Network Inventory Advisor: it helps to easily track installations, software versions, licenses and services on all computers.
Hardware inventory deals with gathering CPU, memory, system, audio & video, peripherals and other hardware details. It helps to easily plan mass upgrades, Vista rollouts or prepare your PCs for Windows 7.
Network inventory helps to collect all relevant data on all network devices that we need to manage and receive detailed OS and devices statistics. Add custom data like service tags, inventory numbers, costs, locations and more; and receive various alerts on important changes in your network.
Network reports helps to build any of the pre-defined reports: logged on users in the network, network inventory report, hard drives usage, antivirus protection status and more! It helps to create our own customizable detailed or tabular network reports, sort them, export (to Excel, SQL, and more) and print right away.
Auditing is required to meet government regulations or just recommended for internal use, auditing strategy helps to keep assets covered as the organization grows.
Some of the benefits are:
Less time spent on admin.
A better management system.
Total Network Inventory will collect the information about all remote computers on a network No on-site visits are necessary!
Total Network Inventory is able to scan remote PCs and retrieve all essential information without the need to install any client software on them.
Total Network Inventory will interrogate and inventory all of the computers on a network, regardless of their total quantity.
With Total Network Inventory, administrators have detailed information about the hardware and software of each PC at their disposal. This helps you tremendously to plan upgrades.
Total Network Inventory is a PC audit and network inventory software for office and large-scale enterprise networks. Total Network Inventory interrogates all computers and notebooks on a network and reports back with complete information about the OS, service packs, hotfixes, hardware, software, running processes, etc. on remote machines. This information is added to the centralized database and then network administrators can generate reports about each or all of the PCs (notebooks) on a network. The program is agent-free and requires no software installed on remote machines.
Total Network Inventory can scan all remote assets for a broad range of information and keep this information in a centralized database. In a separate window you can look at such information as computer names, registered users, organizations, workgroups/domains, IP-addresses, setup dates, time of the last scan, etc. In addition to the collected information, you can add extra inventory information about each machine and its respective user. For example, you can specify such categories as the inventory number (the number generator is provided) as well as add some additional notes. You can also add the information related to the user of the machine and specify the user's real name, department, position, phone, e-mail, etc. This adds clarity to the network inventory process.
The total network inventory collects both the hardware and software inventory.
Hardware-related information:
Processor type and frequency, current clock speed, external clock, multiplier, description, manufacturer, CPU status, socket designation, etc.
Motherboard name and manufacturer, chassis name and manufacturer, BIOS information, system and memory slots, ports, etc.
Memory size and memory modules.
Monitor EDID information and video adapter details.
Name, size, and type of all hard disk, CD, floppy, and removable drives, as well as details about all of the logical disks.
Sound device, video and audio codecs.
Network adapter name, IP-addresses and MAC-addresses, DHCP, DNS, and WINS settings, etc.
Name, type, and settings of the printers.
Name and type of modems.
List of all system devices.
Software and OS-related information:
Operating system name, type, version, build, serial number, etc.
Service packs and hotfixes.
Software installed on the individual machines.
Contents of the "Program files" folder.
Autorun applications starting from the autorun folder and from the registry.
Name and version of the antivirus software.
Database engines.
Environment variables.
All visible and hidden shared resources.
All running processes.
Services.
User accounts.
Network infrastructure that can support Start IT's expanded services.
When the network infrastructure is designed they may last for years. It may be designed in the old way or the proven optimization techniques to ensure that the supply chain is right. The network infrastructure is used to connect the hardware and software devices and to connect the organization to another organization through the internet. The network infrastructure at the beginning of starting the organization should be taken in such a way so that it satisfies the minimum requirements and is flexible to increase its services in for future projects depending on the requirements.
A network can be defined as the grouping of hardware devices and software components which are necessary to connect devices within the organization, and to connect the organization to other organizations and the Internet.
Typical hardware components utilized in a networking environment are network interface cards, computers, routers, hubs, switches, printers, and cabling and phone lines. Typical software components utilized in a networking environment are the network services and protocols.
Only after the hardware is installed and configured, can operating systems and software be installed into the network infrastructure. The operating systems which you install on your computers are considered the main software components within the network infrastructure. This is due to the operating system containing network communication protocols that enable network communication to occur. The operating system also typically includes applications and services that implement security for network communication.
Another concept, namely network infrastructure, is also commonly used to refer to the grouping of physical hardware and logical components which are needed to provide a number of features for the network, including these common features:
Connectivity
Routing and switching capabilities
Network security
Access control
The network or network infrastructure has to exist before a number of servers needed to support applications which are needed by your users can be deployed into your networking environment:
File and print servers
Web and messaging servers
Database servers
Application servers
When you plan your network infrastructure, a number of key elements need to be clarified or determined:
Determine which physical hardware components are needed for the network infrastructure which you want to implement.
Determine the software components needed for the network infrastructure.
Determine the following important factors for your hardware and software components:
Specific location of these components
How the components are to be installed.
How the components are to be configured.
When you implement a network infrastructure, you need to perform a number of activities that can be broadly grouped as follows:
Determine the hardware and software components needed.
Purchase, assemble and install the hardware components.
Install and configure the operating systems, applications and all other software.
The physical infrastructure of the network refers to the physical design of the network together with the hardware components. The physical design of the network is also called the network's topology. When you plan the physical infrastructure of the network, you are usually limited in your hardware component selection by the logical infrastructure of the network
The logical infrastructure of the network is made up of all the software components required to enable connectivity between devices, and to provide network security. The network's logical infrastructure consists of the following:
Software products
Networking protocols/services.
It is therefore the network's logical infrastructure that makes it possible for computers to communicate using the routes defined in the physical network topology.
The logical components of the network topology define a number of important elements:
Speed of the network.
Type of switching that occurs.
Media which will be utilized.
Type of connections which can be formed.
Report of techniques that can be used to boost the Quality of Service (QoS), and a future vision to ensure that high levels of QoS can be maintained.
Quality of Service (QoS) is a set of technologies for managing network traffic in a cost effective manner to enhance user experiences for home and enterprise environments. QoS technologies allow you to measure bandwidth, detect changing network conditions (such as congestion or availability of bandwidth), and prioritize or throttle traffic. For example, QoS technologies can be applied to prioritize traffic for latency-sensitive applications (such as voice or video) and to control the impact of latency-insensitive traffic (such as bulk data transfers)
A communications network forms the backbone of any successful organization. These networks transport a multitude of applications and data, including high-quality video and delay-sensitive data such as real-time voice. The bandwidth-intensive applications stretch network capabilities and resources, but also complement, add value, and enhance every business process. Networks must provide secure, predictable, measurable, and sometimes guaranteed services. Achieving the required Quality of Service (QoS) by managing the delay, delay variation (jitter), bandwidth, and packet loss parameters on a network becomes the secret to a successful end-to-end business solution. Thus, QoS is the set of techniques to manage network resources. --cisco systems .
In the field of computer networking and other packet-switched telecommunication networks, the traffic engineering term quality of service (QoS) refers to resource reservation control mechanisms rather than the achieved service quality. Quality of service is the ability to provide different priority to different applications, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow. For example, a required bit rate, delay, jitter, packet dropping probability and/or bit error rate may be guaranteed. Quality of service guarantees are important if the network capacity is insufficient, especially for real-time streaming multimedia applications such as voice over IP, online games and IP-TV, since these often require fixed bit rate and are delay sensitive, and in networks where the capacity is a limited resource, for example in cellular data communication.
A network or protocol that supports QoS may agree on a traffic contract with the application software and reserve capacity in the network nodes, for example during a session establishment phase. During the session it may monitor the achieved level of performance, for example the data rate and delay, and dynamically control scheduling priorities in the network nodes. It may release the reserved capacity during a tear down phase.
A best-effort network or service does not support quality of service. An alternative to complex QoS control mechanisms is to provide high quality communication over a best-effort network by over-provisioning the capacity so that it is sufficient for the expected peak traffic load. The resulting absence of network congestion eliminates the need for QoS mechanisms.
QoS (Quality of Service) refers to a broad collection of networking technologies and techniques. The goal of QoS is to provide guarantees on the ability of a network to deliver predictable results. Elements of network performance within the scope of QoS often include availability (uptime), bandwidth (throughput), latency (delay), and error rate.
QoS involves prioritization of network traffic. QoS can be targeted at a network interface, toward a given server or router's performance, or in terms of specific applications. A network monitoring system must typically be deployed as part of QoS, to insure that networks are performing at the desired level.
QoS is especially important for the new generation of Internet applications such as VoIP, video-on-demand and other consumer services. Some core networking technologies like Ethernet were not designed to support prioritized traffic or guaranteed performance levels, making it much more difficult to implement QoS solutions across the Internet.
QoS is sometimes used as a quality measure, with many alternative definitions, rather than referring to the ability to reserve resources. Quality of service sometimes refers to the level of quality of service, i.e. the guaranteed service quality. High QoS is often confused with a high level of performance or achieved service quality, for example high bit rate, low latency and low bit error probability.
An alternative and disputable definition of QoS, used especially in application layer services such as telephony and streaming video, is requirements on a metric that reflects or predicts the subjectively experienced quality. In this context, QoS is the acceptable cumulative effect on subscriber satisfaction of all imperfections affecting the service. Other terms with similar meaning are the Quality of Experience (QoE) subjective business concept, the required "user perceived performance" [2], the required "degree of satisfaction of the user" or the targeted "number of happy customers". Examples of measures and measurement methods are Mean Opinion Score (MOS), Perceptual Speech Quality Measure (PSQM) and Perceptual Evaluation of Video Quality (PEVQ).
When looking at packet-switched networks, Quality of Service is affected by various factors, which can be divided into "human" and "technical" factors. Human factors include: stability of service, availability of service, delays, user information. Technical factors include: reliability, scalability, effectiveness, maintainability, Grade of Service, etc.[3]
Many things can happen to packets as they travel from origin to destination, resulting in the following problems as seen from the point of view of the sender and receiver:
ï‚· Throughput
ï‚· Due to varying load from other users sharing the same network resources, the bit-rate (the maximum throughput) that can be provided to a certain data stream may be too low for realtime multimedia services if all data streams get the same scheduling priority.
ï‚· Dropped packets
ï‚· The routers might fail to deliver (drop) some packets if they arrive when their buffers are already full. Some, none, or all of the packets might be dropped, depending on the state of the network, and it is impossible to determine what will happen in advance. The receiving application may ask for this information to be retransmitted, possibly causing severe delays in the overall transmission.
ï‚· Delay
ï‚· It might take a long time for each packet to reach its destination, because it gets held up in long queues, or takes a less direct route to avoid congestion. This is different from throughput, as the delay can build up over time, even if the throughput is almost normal. In some cases, excessive delay can render an application such as VoIP or online gaming unusable.
ï‚· Jitter
ï‚· Packets from the source will reach the destination with different delays. A packet's delay varies with its position in the queues of the routers along the path between source and destination and this position can vary unpredictably. This variation in delay is known as jitter and can seriously affect the quality of streaming audio and/or video.
ï‚· Out-of-order delivery
ï‚· When a collection of related packets is routed through the Internet, different packets may take different routes, each resulting in a different delay. The result is that the packets arrive in a different order than they were sent. This problem requires special additional protocols responsible for rearranging out-of-order packets to an isochronous state once they reach their destination. This is especially important for video and VoIP streams where quality is dramatically affected by both latency and lack of isochronicity.
ï‚· Error
ï‚· Sometimes packets are misdirected, or combined together, or corrupted, while en route. The receiver has to detect this and, just as if the packet was dropped, ask the sender to repeat itself.
ï‚· The Internet2 QoS Working Group concluded that increasing bandwidth is probably more practical than implementing QoS.[1][2] However, this group is focused on next-generation Internet rather than QoS in private and converged networks, where QoS is essential.References
Deploying IP and MPLS QoS for Multiservice Networks: Theory and Practice by John Evans, Clarence Filsfils (Morgan Kaufmann, 2007, ISBN 0-12-370549-5)
Lelli, F. Maron, G. Orlando, S. Client Side Estimation of a Remote Service Execution. 15th International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, 2007. MASCOTS '07. Electronic Edition
Service Level Agreement.
A service level agreement (SLA) is a negotiated agreement between two parties where one is the customer and the other is the service provider.the term SLA is sometimes used to refer to the contracted delivery time (of the service) or performance.SLAs have been used since late 1980s by fixed line telecom operators as part of their contracts with their corporate customers. This practice has spread such that now it is common for a customer to engage a service provider by including a service-level agreement in a wide range of service contracts in practically all industries and markets. Internal departments (such as IT, HR, and Real Estate) in larger organization have adopted the idea of using service-level agreements with their "internal" customers - users in other departments within the same
Service-level agreements are, by their nature, "output" based - the result of the service as received by the customer is the subject of the "agreement." The (expert) service provider can demonstrate their value by organizing themselves with ingenuity, capability, and knowledge to deliver the service required, perhaps in an innovative way. Organizations can also specify the way the service is to be delivered, through a specification (a service-level specification) and using subordinate "objectives" other than those related to the level of service. This type of agreement is known as an "input" SLA. This latter type of requirement is becoming obsolete as organizations become more demanding and shift the delivery methodology risk on to the service provider.230
Many Internet service providers (ISP)s provide their customers with an SLA. More recently, IS departments in major enterprises have adopted the idea of writing a service level agreement so that services for their customers (users in other departments within the enterprise) can be measured, justified, and perhaps compared with those of outsourcing network providers.
Some metrics that SLAs may specify include:
What percentage of the time services will be available
The number of users that can be served simultaneously
Specific performance benchmarks to which actual performance will be periodically compared
The schedule for notification in advance of network changes that may affect users
Help desk response time for various classes of problems
Dial-in access availability
Usage statistics that will be provided.
Improve customer service by utilizing service level management tools. Making the most of service level agreements involves human and technological resources. Information technology (IT) is a field in constant evolution, where assessments, reviews and audits continue on a daily basis to improve products and service. In current times, sometimes customer service is the only thing that sets your organization apart.
Train your employees to seek customer satisfaction with an eye on cost-to-service ratio, then use developing technology to track performance against existing service level agreements. If you want to improve your service level agreement skills, review the following information:
Service Level Agreement Package
Product Information
Are your Service Level Agreements packaged with goals, metrics, and remedies? ICN's SLA Package will provide the documents you need to galvanize your supplier relationships. Some of the documents are stand alone while others are packaged in formal documents like statements of work. This package contains seven documents spanning over 160 pages of field proven information.
The package contains actual working documents such as:
Service Level Agreement Master Template
Outsourcing Agreement Service Level
Statement of Work Data Center Service Level Metrics
Statement of Work Call Center Service Level
Application Service Provider Service Level
Operations Center Service Level Template and Metrics
Help Desk and Call Center Customer Service Levels=sunday may 2010/ICN
1. Creativity and flexibility are necessary for an SLA manager.
2. Service level agreement software and tool kits ease development fears.
3. Service level agreements are dynamic documents.---By Gail L. Perry, Freelance Writer / MSW, Life Coach
Service-level agreements can contain numerous service performance metrics with corresponding service level objectives. A common case in IT Service Management is a call center or service desk. Metrics commonly agreed to in these cases include:
ABA (Abandonment Rate): Percentage of calls abandoned while waiting to be answered.
ASA (Average Speed to Answer): Average time (usually in seconds) it takes for a call to be answered by the service desk.
TSF (Time Service Factor): Percentage of calls answered within a definite timeframe, e.g., 80% in 20 seconds.
FCR (First Call Resolution): Percentage of incoming calls that can be resolved without the use of a callback or without having the caller call back the helpdesk to finish resolving the case.
TAT (Turn Around Time): Time taken to complete a certain task.
Uptime Agreements are another very common metric, often used for data services such as shared hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers. Common agreements include percentage of network uptime, power uptime, amount of scheduled maintenance windows, etc.
A Categorization Scheme for SLA Metrics (Adrian Paschke and Elisabeth Schnappinger-Gerull
Internet-based Information Systems, Technische Universität München, Germany
{Paschke, Schnappi}@in.tum.de.de
http://ibis.in.tum.de/staff/paschke/rbsla/index.htm)
Abstract: Effective SLAs are extremely important to assure business
continuity, customer satisfaction and trust. The metrics used to measure and
manage performance compliance to SLA commitments are the heart of a
successful agreement and are a critical long term success factor. Lack of
experience in the use and automation of performance metrics causes
problems for many organizations as they attempt to formulate their SLA
strategies and set the metrics needed to support those strategies. This paper
contributes to a systematic categorization of SLA contents with a particular
focus on SLA metrics. The intended goal is to support the design and
implementation of automatable SLAs based on efficient metrics for
automated monitoring and reporting. The categorization facilitates design
decisions, analysis of existing SLAs and helps to identify responsibilities for
critical IT processes in disruption management during the execution of
SLAs.
1Service Level Agreements (SLAs) defining the quality attributes (QoS - Quality of
Service) and guarantees a service is required to process, are of growing
commercial interest with a deep impact on the strategic and organisational
processes, as many research studies and intensified interest in accepted
management standards like ITIL1 or the new BS150002 show. They are used in all
areas of IT reaching from hosting or communication services to help desk or
problem resolution. A well-defined and effective SLA correctly fulfils the
expectations of all participants and provides metrics for accurately measuring
performance to the guaranteed Service Level (SL) objectives. During the
monitoring and enforcement phase the defined metrics will be used to detect
violations to the promised SLs and to derive consequential activities in terms of
rights and obligations. They play a key role in metering, accounting and reporting
and provide data for further analysis and refinement of SLAs in the analysis phase.
SLA metrics are defined from a variety of disciplines, such as business process
management, service and application management, or traditional systems and
network management.
2 Service Level Agreements
This section gives an insight into Service Level Agreements and in general IT
service contracts. It categorizes different types of service contracts, presents the
main component parts and defines the goals in order to reach a common
understanding. We first start with the definition of some terms used throughout the
paper:
• SLA metrics are used to measure the performance characteristics of the service
objects. They are either retrieved directly from the managed resources such as
servers, middleware or instrumented applications or are created by aggregating
such direct metrics into higher level composite metrics. Typical examples of
direct metrics are the MIB variables of the IETF Structure of Management
Information (SMI) such as number of invocations, system uptime, outage period
or technical network performance metrics such as loss, delay, utilization etc.
which are collected via measurement directives such as management interfaces,
protocol messages, URIs etc. Composite metrics use a specific function
averaging one or more metrics over a specific amount of time, e.g. average
availability, or breaking them down according to certain criteria, e.g. maximum
response time, minimum throughput, top 5% etc.
• Service Levels and Guarantees a.k.a. SLA rules represent the promises and
guarantees with respect to graduated high/low ranges, e.g., average availability
range [low: 95% , high: 99%, median: 97%], so that it can be evaluated whether
the measured metrics exceed, meet or fall below the defined service levels at a
certain time point or in a certain validity period. They can be informally
represented as if-then rules which might be chained in order to form
graduations, complex policies and conditional guarantees, e.g., conditional rights
and obligation with exceptions, violations and consequential actions: "If the
average service availability during on month is below 95% then the service
provider is obliged to pay a penalty of 20%. ".
• IT Management Processes / ITIL Processes are IT management processes
defining common practices in areas such as Incident, Problem, Configuration,
Change or Service Level Management.
• SLA (Service Level Agreement): An SLA is a document that describes the
performance criteria a provider promises to meet while delivering a service. It
typically also sets out the remedial actions and any penalties that will take effect
if performance falls below the promised standard. It is an essential component of
the legal contract between a service consumer and the provider.
A service level agreement (SLA) is a negotiated agreement between two parties where one is the customer and the other is the service provider.the term SLA is sometimes used to refer to the contracted delivery time (of the service) or performance.SLAs have been used since late 1980s by fixed line telecom operators as part of their contracts with their corporate customers. This practice has spread such that now it is common for a customer to engage a service provider by including a service-level agreement in a wide range of service contracts in practically all industries and markets. Internal departments (such as IT, HR, and Real Estate) in larger organization have adopted the idea of using service-level agreements with their "internal" customers - users in other departments within the same
Service-level agreements are, by their nature, "output" based - the result of the service as received by the customer is the subject of the "agreement." The (expert) service provider can demonstrate their value by organizing themselves with ingenuity, capability, and knowledge to deliver the service required, perhaps in an innovative way. Organizations can also specify the way the service is to be delivered, through a specification (a service-level specification) and using subordinate "objectives" other than those related to the level of service. This type of agreement is known as an "input" SLA. This latter type of requirement is becoming obsolete as organizations become more demanding and shift the delivery methodology risk on to the service provider.230
Many Internet service providers (ISP)s provide their customers with an SLA. More recently, IS departments in major enterprises have adopted the idea of writing a service level agreement so that services for their customers (users in other departments within the enterprise) can be measured, justified, and perhaps compared with those of outsourcing network providers.
