Patent ID: 7574502

Claim:
A method of monitoring compliance with a service level agreement, comprising: associating a plurality of service level objectives with a resource in a corresponding information technology infrastructure, each service level objective associated with a corresponding service level agreement; determining a first value for each service level objective, wherein: the service level objective specifies at least one measurable criterion against which the performance of the resource is compared to determine if each criterion is met, and the first value corresponds to a value associated with a threshold for failure to meet the associated service level objective; determining a second value for each service level objective, wherein: the second value corresponds to an early warning threshold value and is determined so as to be detected before the associated first value for that service level objective; monitoring the resource by electronically obtaining service level agreement information for the resource that relates to each service level objective; evaluating the obtained service level agreement information to determine if the early warning threshold value associated with any one of the service level objectives has been breached for the resource; automatically determining a critical service level objective from the plurality of service level objectives as being the service level objective that the resource is closest to failing to comply with and determining for that critical service level objective, a measure of how close the resource is to non-compliance based upon the associated threshold for failure to meet the associated service level objective value of the critical service level objective, if at least one of the early warning threshold values has been breached; and generating an early warning notification indicating that failure to meet a service level objective may occur if at least one of the early warning threshold values has been breached, wherein the early warning notification identifies at least the critical service level objective and conveys the measure of how close the resource is to non-compliance of the critical service level objective.