Setting Expectations and Service Level Agreements

Setting expectations for server and network performance and agreeing on acceptable levels of service is perhaps one of the hardest tasks to perform, yet a very necessary task when you are determining a sizing and capacity strategy for your SMS deployment.

SLAs are the most common ways to establish conditions of operation agreed upon by all parties involved in the operation and performance of the system. One SLA might specify that the workload item or transaction in question should process within a certain span of time, for example, five seconds. Another SLA might specify that no more than 85 percent of memory can be used to ensure that page faults are kept to a minimum. If a violation of an SLA occurs, it generally indicates a hardware resource failure or overload that might require an upgrade or replacement of equipment.

Consequently, performance tracking is an integral part of creating realistic SLAs.

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