Service provider management: Now it's the ISPs turn

By John Morency
Network World on Network/Systems Management, 03/17/99

Despite the Service Level Management (SLM) product plethora that users face today, a few key areas continue to stand out as noticeably lacking in product support. The areas that I'm referring to are Internet Access and VPN services that are delivered by either ISPs or more traditional telcos. This lack of product coverage is particularly ironic in light of the fact that Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are one of the primary means by which these same providers are seeking to differentiate themselves. Prominent examples include GTE's availability guarantees for its VPN Advantage service and similar offerings for UUNET's UULink DSL service. Most other major providers now offer some form of availability or performance-based SLAs for either their Frame Relay service, their Internet Access service or both.

Even with the increase in service provider SLA guarantees, however, few if any corporate customers have had any means of measuring or validating monthly service quality claims. The obvious major exception is frame relay support where many industry players such as DeskTalk Systems, Concord Communications, Visual Networks, NextPoint and Paradyne currently offer some form of hardware and/or software product support for more rigorous service level tracking of carrier-based frame relay services.

ISP service delivery, however, has been an entirely different story. Despite a pronounced increased in service level buzz surrounding many ISP service rollouts, users to date have had very few options other than to accept provider claims regarding availability and performance delivery. This has resulted in a credibility gap with some users who often dismiss these provider claims as little more than "paper SLAs" with very little substance to back them up.

Given this backdrop, I found a recent announcement from Inverse Network Technologies to be an encouraging start in addressing this painfully obvious shortfall. Inverse's IP InSight product family offers both service providers and service consumers an improved approach for more effective service level tracking for dial-up Internet access. In a break from more traditional product models, this offering actually builds upon the Internet response time testing that Inverse Technologies performed, which was utilized by a number of the major ISPs. Product details can be gained from the Inverse Web site; however, the result of their approach is an offering that can be utilized by service providers and enterprise managers to respectively monitor access performance against service level targets. This can be applied to more traditional Internet access or to dial VPN services.

I think I speak for a lot of users in hoping that this approach is the first of many more to come. In order to facilitate the information flow on these products, I'd welcome the opportunity to hear from any readers who already have something or who will soon release offerings in this area.