On Thu, 28 May 2009, Tom Limoncelli wrote: > Lastly, penalize people that beat their SLA. This is controversial > but hear me out. If the SLA says we'll have 99.9% uptime, and I > provide 99.999% uptime, that means I'm wasting money on more > redundancy than is needed or avoiding important system upgrades (and > therefore impeding innovation). If I am hovering around 99.9% by +/- > 0.1% then I've demonstrated that I can balance uptime with budget and > innovation. If management complains about outages but I'm still at > 99.9%, then they need to (in writing) tell me what they want to do: > give me more money or slow down the rate of upgrades. They may back > down or they may choose one of the other options. That's fine. If > you think about it, the essential role of management is to set goals > and provide resources to meet those goals. By working to hit (not > exceed) your SLA you are creating an environment where they can > perform their essential role whether they realize it or not.
I've got mixed feelings about this one. on the one hand, I get _really_ annoyed when I am completing tickets in the 2-day SLA while others are failing to get important things done because they are constantly interrupting their work to do tickets immediatly and then see those others praised while I get complaints so here I would fully agree with you. on the other hand, for server uptime outside of maintinance, you can buy commodity hardware that will run for years without any failures (your upgrades are during the allowed maintinance), but you can have another box of the same type that fails in a month, so you still need to have the service be HA. if things go well you drasticly exceed your SLA, but if you removed the redundancy you run a very real risk of drasticly failing to meet your SLA with a single incident. how do you account for this? David Lang _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
