Is your service provider making the grade?

Throughout my career I have been mostly on the service provider side of the house. I worked on multiple accounts and was generally assigned to the ones that were troubled. One of the things that was often brought up but rarely seen was the contract itself, or more importantly the service levels and reports that were agreed to in that contract. As time went on the players disappeared, the understanding of those service levels became a bit fuzzy, and the reports became nonexistent. Having these items is how you as a customer can ensure that your service provider is 'making the grade'.

Common SLA's and Reports related to a corporate email environment should include message delivery time as well as message totals, if the targets are missed financial penalties may be charged to the service provider. Producing reports requires keeping close tabs on your environment. Generally the service provider is required to collect this data and provide you as the customer with the final reports.

In my experience as the "service provider" I have seen the following mistakes on the customer's part:
1. The customer is unaware of what the SLA's are
2. The customer is unaware of what reports they are entitled too
3. The customer does not have access to the software used to generate the SLA's
and reports

AND the biggest mistake of all

4. The customer does not have the ability to validate the data that your service
provider gives you

What should you do to get a handle on the situation? Find out what your SLA's are and what reports you are entitled too. You could request access to the software used by your service provider but what I would recommend is using your own software. My reasoning behind this is that you are spending allot of money to your service provider, it is worth the investment to put checks and balances in place to ensure you are getting what you pay for. In addition to that your service provider is obligated only to provide you with the reports defined in the contract, having your own tool gives you the freedom to create whatever reports you'd like.

The software I recommend is Cooperteam's Mail Flow Analyzer. The software engine runs on a Windows based server and the collectors can run on many platforms. With this software you can quickly validate the SLA's as well as generate mail volume reports not only for your environment as a whole but by individual servers as well. The software also comes with a dashboard component so that you and your management team can see how your environment is performing. This would keep your service provider honest and your management team happy.

You, as the Administrator, can utilize the tool for other things as well. You can see what servers are over utilized as well as the servers that are not as busy. This information can be used to recommend load balancing or even server consolidation. You will also have the ability to search for messages and you will be able to see what types of attachments are going through your environment. This is not a tool that scans the log file to generate its information. Data is collected as messages go through the mail.box. Coooperteam offers a 30 day trial so that you can validate the power of the software. An installation takes less than an hour.

There are many more things that you can do with Mail Flow Analyzer. If you would like to check it out go to http://www.cooperteam.com. If you would like a demo of the software you can contact me at dan.huey@cooperteam.com. If you would like a price quote please contact sales.amer@cooperteam.com and provide them with the number of users in your environment.

Thanks for reading.
Huey