Define service level agreements

This topic describes how to define service level agreements (SLAs).

You can define SLAs in Controller or Analysis. The SLAs can measure scenario goals over time intervals, or over a whole scenario run. For details, see Service level agreements overview.

Tip: For a use-case scenario related to this task, see Define service level agreements - use-case scenario.

To define SLAs:

  1. Prerequisites

    If you are defining an SLA for Transaction Response Time, your scenario must include a script that contains at least one transaction.

  2. Run through the SLA wizard

    In the Service Level Agreement pane, click New to open the Service Level Agreement wizard. For user interface details, see Service Level Agreement wizard.

    1. Select a measurement for the SLA.

    2. If you are defining an SLA for Transaction Response Time (Percentile, Average, or APDEX), select the transactions to include in your goal.

    3. (Optional) When evaluating SLA statuses over a timeline, select load criteria to take into account and define appropriate load value ranges for the load criteria. For an example, see Define service level agreements - use-case scenario.

    4. Set thresholds for the measurements.

      • If Transaction Response Time (Average) or Errors per Second exceed the defined thresholds, Analysis displays a Failed SLA status.

      • If Transaction Response Time (Percentile), Total Hits per run, Average Hits (hits/second) per run, Total Throughput (bytes) per run, or Average Throughput (bytes/second) per run are lower than the defined threshold, Analysis displays a Failed SLA status.

      • For Passed Transactions Ratio, if the percentage of passed transactions is lower than the defined percentage threshold (between 0 to 100), Analysis displays a Failed SLA status.
      • Using the Transaction Response Time (APDEX) thresholds, Analysis produces APDEX scores.

  3. Define a tracking period - optional

    For measurements whose SLA statuses are determined over time intervals, you need to define the frequency of the time intervals, that is, the tracking period. For details, see Tracking period.

    For user interface details, see Advanced Options dialog box (Service Level Agreement pane).

  4. Results

    When analyzing your scenario run, Analysis compares the data collected from the scenario run against the SLA settings, and determines SLA statuses and APDEX scores. These are displayed in the Statistics section of the default Summary Report.

    You can edit the SLA settings after the scenario run—the Statistics section is updated to reflect the new settings.

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