Web Monitoring and SaaS ROI -- Joined at the Hip

Handing over your company's important business applications to a Software-as-a-Service vendor  may sound like a huge relief for your IT team's workload, but you still need to make sure that your SaaS vendor is getting the job done right.

To do that you need to insist on Internet performance monitoring as well as a clear, protective and verifiable Service Level Agreement with your SaaS vendor – you are requiring an SLA, right? Without an SLA it will be difficult to meet the expectations of your internal users and ensure that you’re  getting the online performance you are paying for.

This is definitely not a minor point. Remember, instead of having your own IT team run and monitor the applications, you are turning them over to an external SaaS provider on your behalf. If the SaaS provider doesn't deliver, they won't be the only ones feeling the pressure.

Three Keys to Include in Your SaaS SLA

So where to start?

Brad DeSent, president of Buffalo Grove, Ill.-based Apex Consulting Group, which advises clients on using SaaS services, said it's critical for both parties to confirm Internet and application performance to protect each of their interests.

For SaaS vendors, that means doing something proactive so they can show they are able to handle the loads that their clients are putting on the network, DeSent said. Internet performance monitoring fits that bill so that at every step of the way real-time metrics and application uptime can be accurately measured, recorded and proven for every SaaS customer and workload.

To be sure your interests are protected, DeSent recommends requiring a three-pronged monitoring strategy in your SLA:

First, make sure that the SaaS provider defines what they are using to monitor the performance and the uptime of the applications. Ask them to show you exactly how and what they monitor.

Next, have the vendor walk you through their internal alerting, escalation and communication process. "Specifically ask the provider, 'tell me about an outage that you had and how you reacted to it and how you were communicating with your clients during that period,'" DeSent said.

Last but not least, be certain that they have a recovery plan for their systems when an outage occurs, because inevitably, they will occur.

"Know what they are going to do for you," DeSent said. "This can be as simple as a one-page description of how the SaaS provider deals with the problem."

SaaS Vendors Need to Spell Out Monitoring Requirements in Detail

Bradley Gross, an attorney in the Business Technology Practice Group at Becker & Poliakoff P.A. in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said that for SaaS providers, Internet performance monitoring is a "must-have" that detects problems before they can result in unscheduled down time. The monitoring services should be present 24x7 to protect users.

Making sure those kinds of terms, and the means to measure performance, are included in a well-written SLA is critical, Gross said. "Too often, SaaS vendors draft SLAs without an adequate understanding of what they can, and cannot, deliver," he said.

In many cases, while some kind of performance monitoring is already being done by SaaS services, SLAs are not automatically included in service contracts and must be brought up in detail by customers, he said. "It should be in their list of due diligence questions."

Ben Pring, an analyst with Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., said that protecting yourself with an SLA from your SaaS provider isn't enough if there are no teeth in the agreement.

"We're pointing out to people that without a penalty structure, then the SLA isn’t worth the paper it's written on, and penalty structures are more the exception than the norm," he said. "Without an SLA, a [SaaS] contract is essentially worthless."

Great Performance Metrics as a Marketing Tool

Another analyst, China Martens with the New York-based 451 Group, said that  Internet performance monitoring investments can payoff for SaaS vendors as well because they can leverage their positive benchmarks to new customers as a marketing tool.

"It could be that key kind of differentiator for the level of service they can provide," Martens said. "They can show customers what you are getting for your money. If you are publicizing it, it could be like a marketing thing rather than just an internal tool."

Dan Olds, principal analyst with Beaverton, Ore.-based Gabriel Consulting Group Inc., said that today's Internet performance monitoring vendors are starting to hear new needs from SaaS users.

In addition to the uptime performance metrics, companies using SaaS services are starting to look at getting "quality of service" metrics, including how long it takes to connect, stability and persistence of the connection and how the performance is perceived by users, Olds said.

"In the future, I'd expect to not only see SaaS vendors providing their customers with performance data, but also explicitly guaranteeing that they will deliver a certain level of uptime or response time," he said.

The most successful SaaS vendors will be the ones who then disclose their market-leading performance metrics boldly to their customers, Olds said. "Competitive pressure will force them to go the extra mile in order to stand out in the market."

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