Reports only show data from a specific tim e period?

[Paul L. Allen]

Hi Andre 

Andre Bergei writes: 

> Yes, that's is the idea. The reason the managers want this is to prove
> to the customer That they had uptime during the service hours. The hole 
> point is that  They dont care what happen at night, that is our problem,
> the sys admins. If there is downtime during Service hours, there will be 
> economic penalties if totalt downtime dont meet The demands of the SLA 
> agreement.

I understand the reasoning, I just dispute the logic behind it. 

I know that ADSL lines in the UK are unreliable - I know it for a fact
because Nagios proves it to me.  Most of the problems occur out of
working hours (because we consider 0800-1830 to be working hours).  Our
clients want to know about them because they can claim compensation from
their ADSL suppliers even though the outages didn't affect actual
operation. 

I know that if I have a host or services which are unreliable out of
hours, when the workload is minimal, and which are not caused by power
failures or ADSL outages that there are serious problems. One of our
clients had a very bad power feed that caused eventual physical disk
corruption, and without statistics showing that many of the problems
occurred out of working hours would have had a harder time claiming from
he power company. 

But, in the end, our clients want to know that we are being honest with
them.  That we are not hiding problems that occur out of working hours
and pretending everything is perfect because they have not *yet* had
problems during working hours.  They want to know what is happening out
of working hours to prove that we're not hiding anything from them
(they would want such proof from whoever provided their infrastructure). 

It seems to me that what you are arguing for is that the statistics
CGIs should take into account working hours for the contacts who view
them.  So that if you view the stats you see the whole picture and if
some client whose working hours are 7am-7pm views them he or she sees
only the problems that occurred in that interval.  That way you could
define user x-working-hours who only saw the limited information and
x-overall who saw everything (which would allow customer X to see both
views and know that you met your SLA but that there are problems outside
of working hours which might eventually impact regular operations). 

> Why would we want to supress information?
> This is solved by having techy reports for the techyies, and 
> Boring availability reports for the managers. The right information to
> the right people, a good thing!

Throwing away information is ALWAYS a bad idea.  Providing two different
views onto the information ("this is the availability when you actually
needed it" and "this is the overall availability whether you needed it
or not") is a good thing. 

>  Like it or not, in the "wonderful" world of out-sourcing, things like
> service level agreements becomes more and more common, in fact, customers 
> _demand_ it.

As I just explained, our customers not only want SLAs during periods when
the service is critical to them, they also want to know about problems
outside of those hours for various reasons.  If nothing else, giving
them the 24x7 info shows them that we're being honest with them.  If
every host they have goes down within roughly the same time interval
we can point out that it must have been an ADSL failure or a power
failure; if one host alone has problems they know it is probably our
fault.  Whether it happens out of working hours or not, they use that
information to evaluate our service level against that of their Internet
feed and power feed.  If I can't be honest with our customers, I don't
want to work here... 

-- 
Paul Allen
Softflare Support 




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