16 key service quality metrics to boost cloud engagements

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

What kinds of metrics should you demand from your cloud provider or data center? In their just-released book, Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture, authors Thomas Erl, Zaigham Mahmood and Ricardo Puttini spell out some of the key varaibles that make for a successful service level agreement for cloud services.

Quality of service is essential to meet cloud consumers’ business requirements, and the following are examples Erl and his co-authors provide as ways to measure and ultimately assure this quality:

• Availability Rate Metric: "Percentage of service uptime; measured as total uptime against total time"; expressed in percentages.
• Outage Duration Metric: "Duration of a single outage"; measured by date and time outage began and ended, expressed in hours and minutes.
• Mean-Time Between Failures (MTBF) Metric: "Expected time between consecutive service failures"; measured by normal operational period duration and number of failures; expressed as average number of days…

• Reliability Rate Metric: "Percentage of successful service outcomes under pre-defined situations"; measured by total number of successful responses; expressed as percentages.
• Network Capacity Metric: "Measurable characteristics of network capacity"; measured by bandwidth, throughput in bits per second; expressed as number of megabits per second.
• Storage Device Capacity Metric: "Measurable characteristics of storage device capacity"; measured and expressed in storage size in gigabytes.
• Server Capacity Metric: "Measurable characteristics of server capacity"; measured and expressed as number of CPUs, CPU frequency in GHz, RAM and storage size in GBs…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/16-key-service-quality-metrics-to-boost-cloud-engagements-7000018353/