To manage service delivery well, it is essential that the service management system work well with the network and element management systems to handle each of the following tasks:

• dynamic network representation—to handle new and out-of-service managed resources
• proactive data and event monitoring—to integrate data from a set of diverse vendor and protocol sources and identify potential problems
• automated topological and model—based reasoning—to understand the impacts of events based on connectivity and configuration
• cause-effect inferencing—to map between the effects of anomalies and their service impacts
• root cause analysis—to differentiate between symptoms of a problem and the true problem
• operator guidance—to assist to prioritizing operator actions
• automated testing—to verify diagnoses while minimizing network impacts
• automated fault correction—to implement network reconfiguration to optimize service delivery

These capabilities are essential for truly effective service-level management. Without them, most of the event management responsibility continues to fall onto already overburdened operators.

Mapping network events onto services and related SLAs allows for real-time management of the business. Key performance indicators can be polled periodically, and trend analysis of the historical values can be used for proactive SLA management, predicting limit violations. As a consequence of a violation of an SLA condition, any actions—not just reports—can be performed, allowing corrective measures to be automated. The service management system should include built-in object models of the network devices and their connection, the services, SLAs, and customers. It should be able to perform what-if analysis for possible customers affected by a potential failure and be able to generate a list of all devices used by a customer or group (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Basic Network, Service, and Customer Mapping