SaaS businesses are built upon the simplicity of computing, storage, and networking they provide to their users. Web and mobile applications provided by SaaS businesses are meant to be straight forward to consume for users. However, it’s important to deliver an excellent experience to your users who rely heavily on your reliability and performance. Service Level Agreements (SLA) plays an important role here. SLAs fundamentally define availability, response time, and penalties, but in order to meet your users’ needs, you need to get the bigger picture.
For a SaaS business, SLA compliance should effectively and efficiently establish the following criteria:
- Uptime
- Performance
- Issues detection and resolution
- Update and upgrade management
- Data accessibility in the required format
- Data portability among different vendors
- Data security and privacy
- Data recovery and disaster management
- Service consistency and accountability across various locations
- Termination and exit strategy with an easy and smooth transition
SLA Compliance: Identify Components to Monitor
Once SLAs are established, you need to consistently monitor your SaaS business infrastructure along with web and mobile applications to make sure they meet the defined thresholds. If any of the compliance metrics are out of the range, you should have all the required information to identify and resolve the issue. Here is how you can achieve SLA compliance goal for your SaaS business.
- Identify critical business transactions. To achieve the overall availability to your users, you first need to identify critical business transactions they perform, such as login, add product, edit product, upload image, process orders, download reports, and so on. Monitor these transactions 24/7 for uptime and performance.
- Third-party services and APIs. More often than not, because of the high dependency of SaaS businesses on outside vendors, it is a third-party service/API that has an issue. It can cause your web and mobile applications to go down or have a performance issue. So, monitoring third-party service/APIs continuously becomes a necessity to detect and respond to an issue.
- Infrastructure. Your SaaS business is not just about transactions but also the data. To meet all SLA compliance you need to measure and monitor business transactions along with stored and transmitted data. This needs to be done for both inside and outside infrastructure for being able to prove where the issue occurs and who is accountable for it.
- Outside-in/end user perspective. This is the key to application performance and SLA compliance. SaaS business is all about the user experience without hiccups. Browser-based code-level tracking and tracing are not enough to inspect what is going on with your users when they use your applications. To get a complete understanding, you need to monitor the outside-in flow from the end user’s perspective to capture the experience. This will help you identify real-world issues to enhance your user experience.
- Set acceptable performance KPIs and alert system. Set benchmarks for performance metrics such as response time, threshold, error rate, flow, transaction health, resource utilization, and implement a monitoring solution to measure them. Have a comprehensive alert system in place to raise an alert when the matrices are out of the SLA range.
Monitoring SLA Compliance with Dotcom-Monitor
To maintain effective and efficient SLA compliance for a SaaS business, it is required to have a monitoring solution to measure transaction and data metrics from the end user’s perspective and being able to proactively identify and resolve issues. In addition to that, you also need to be able to pinpoint the issue’s location and define accountability for it. The solutions from Dotcom-Monitor let you do just that by emulating end-users with scripted transactions across multiple devices and locations.
- 24/7 end-user monitoring. Synthetic web page and web application monitoring solutions can run end user’s emulation continuously during peak and non-peak hours, providing you with the detailed information to proactively identify and resolve an issue before it impacts your end user.
- Infrastructure monitoring. Being able to identify an issues location and accountability, synthetic monitoring will give you a complete picture of inside and outside infrastructure with the required information capturing.
- Third-party services/APIs monitoring. When it comes to monitoring the third-party services and APIs, the Dotcom-Monitor solution excels at it. As this is an important part of SLA compliance, the platform provides the tools that will give you the ability to avoid frequent performance issues related to third-party services.
- Monitoring from multiple locations. This one of the most important aspects that most SaaS businesses take for granted. It is a very real possibility that your SaaS applications are meeting compliance in one region but fails in another region. Different kinds of performance issues can arise from different geographies and you need to monitor, identify, isolate, and resolve them quickly.A good synthetic monitoring solution will test your applications from different locations around the world and alert you if any of the locations are facing a performance issue. This will make sure of SLA compliance across the globe.
SLA Reporting with Dotcom-Monitor
SLA compliance establishment and monitoring for a SaaS business are not only required for great user experience, but also for your business to have an edge on your competitors and evolve into a great product with efficient service. Dotcom-Monitor users have the ability to set up SLA reports to ensure SLA requirement are continually being met. Users can choose to run these reports on-demand or configure daily, weekly, or monthly SLA report that show when SLA goals aren’t being met. These reports can then be shared with your internal teams or with service providers. These reports can ensure uptime is being met or when the SLA falls below the pre-defined threshold. This can help avoid conflicts, show that SLAs are being met, or avoid any unnecessary chargebacks.
Try the full Dotcom-Monitor platform for free and see how our solutions can help you maintain SLA compliance.
