Sodexo Ensures Better Reliability and SLA Performance with Apica’s Service-Level Assurance Platform

“Since we started to use Apica, we have a quality-assured user experience and can track availability of internal applications as well as SLA performance of our cloud vendors.”

Business Challenge

The IT Operations team at Sodexo is responsible for monitoring all internal and external applications and ensuring quality-assured SLA agreements with cloud vendors that host business-critical systems. To support the applications teams that are the primary service owners of the cloud vendors, IT Ops needed a consistent approach for troubleshooting errors and performance issues, as well as for measuring SLAs to enforce governance. Additionally, Sodexo has a cloud-first approach to application hosting, and expects to have the majority of its internal applications there within the next few years. The IT Ops team thus required a solution that can monitor both legacy and cloud infrastructure.

Benefits

    • Better reliability
    • Improved user experience
    • Proven standard for guaranteeing SLAs

Challenges

    • Troubleshooting errors and performance issues
    • Measuring and ensuring SLAs

Solution

Sodexo selected Apica’s service-level monitoring platform to guarantee availability of internal applications and monitor cloud vendor SLA agreements. Apica was the best vendor to create the advanced scripts needed to monitor both legacy and cloud infrastructure. The Apica platform also provided several key features that were crucial to Sodexo: the ability to securely monitor internal and external applications from a single system, and access to script expertise support from a professional services team. That team converted Sodexo’s old scripts as a turnkey service.
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The Benefits

Once implemented, the Apica platform enabled IT Ops to ensure better reliability and better user experience for both business users and applications teams. And with the monitoring data, the company now has a standard for holding vendors accountable for their SLAs. “Most of the vendor issues are short term in nature,” says Timothy Hurd, Senior Manager, Operations for Sodexo. “They have a bad 2 to 3 months, and Apica helps to manage through that time frame.” Other parts of the company benefit from the Apica platform as well. Everyone in middle management receives a weekly performance report looking back at the past four months, to better understand how specific applications are trending. And upper management uses a service quality dashboard that displays data about the availability of all applications. Because it uses the Apica service-level agreement platform to enforce SLA agreements, Sodexo found that the tool quickly paid for itself. When monitoring reveals that SLAs have been broken, vendors have to issue service credits that can later be used as payment. Knowing that continuous monitoring is in place “keeps our cloud vendors alert and supportive,” says Hurd. “Service reliability is key. We will not pay for an outage.” All vendors now have to agree to have their services monitored by Apica’s service-level platform, or the likelihood of having their contracts renewed is slim. “Since we started to use Apica, we have a quality-assured user experience and can track availability of internal applications as well as SLA performance of our cloud vendors,” says Hurd. “We achieved an ROI on the Apica investment in a matter of months.”