The ability to integrate SLA (service-level agreement) monitoring, analysis and reporting makes ProactiveNet 6.0 appealing to a new group of stakeholders: "senior-level IT management and business unit management," said David Langlais, vice president of marketing at ProactiveNet in Santa Clara, Calif.

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"By looking at the business level, they can see, 'How much revenue or productivity am I getting from my applications?'" he said.

Increasing pressure on IT to run its function as a service has fueled demand for SLA management, although only a handful of tools provide such functionality. ProactiveNet's update gives customers the ability to create and manage SLAs on a more granular basis and then roll up specific SLAs to view overall performance.

"You can set an SLA value for any attribute in the system, and you can create hierarchical SLAs," Langlais said. Those can include SLAs for software, application servers, network devices and transactions, and all of them can be rolled "into a single performance SLA for online banking."

Once an SLA violation occurs, operators can drill down through the hierarchy to learn what the problem is and which sub-SLAs are causing it. "You can directly link SLA noncompliance into the problem in the IT infrastructure causing the violation," Langlais said.

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