Introducing CA SOI › CA SOI Terminology and Concepts › Quality and Risk

Quality and Risk

CA SOI uses health and availability data from your domain management tools to monitor your IT services from the following perspectives:

Quality

Quality indicates the level of excellence that consumers of an IT service experience, whether the consumers are customers, end users, or other IT services. The levels of quality are Operational, Slightly Degraded, Moderately Degraded, Severely Degraded, Down, and Unknown. The highest propagated impact of an associated quality alert determines the service quality value.

Risk

Risk indicates the likelihood of delivering the quality of service that is required to support the overall business objectives. The highest propagated impact of an associated risk alert determines the service risk value.

Business objectives include the following goals:

• Qualitatively, the concern that, at any given time, a service is not capable of delivering its intended functionality.
• Quantitatively, any metric or group of metrics that can analytically measure the ability, over time, of a service to deliver its intended functionality (for example, Service Impact).

Examples of an increased risk are a loss of redundancy in a web server farm or a failover condition in a database cluster. The risk of service degradation is either None, Slight, Moderate, Severe, or Down. CA NSM, CA eHealth, and CA Spectrum are some of the domain managers that produce risk events.

Consider a server in a web server farm that experiences a failure and is no longer accessible. This failure could increase the risk to delivering an online service, but there might be enough capacity to meet the current consumer demand. Therefore, quality is still at acceptable levels.

CA SOI uses the worst service quality or risk level to determine service health. For example, a slightly degraded service with a severe risk of degradation would have a service health of Critical. The following table shows the available Health, Quality, and Risk values: