{"id":4587,"date":"2012-04-23T11:11:04","date_gmt":"2012-04-23T18:11:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.infoblox.com\/?p=4587"},"modified":"2020-05-06T10:31:43","modified_gmt":"2020-05-06T17:31:43","slug":"what-is-your-sla-for-human-latency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.infoblox.com\/blog\/community\/what-is-your-sla-for-human-latency\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Your SLA for Human Latency?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a previous life as a product manager at service providers GTE and\u00a0Verizon<\/a>,\u00a0 I discussed SLAs for latency of services like frame relay and MPLS thousands of time. \u00a0The focus on SLAs is always tied to the critical business services \u2013 meaning the transport latency needed to meet the needs of the applications and end-user requirements.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0recent article<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0Shamus McGillicuddy<\/a>\u00a0from TechTarget brought to light an interesting concept \u2013 measuring Human Latency.\u00a0 Human latency is typically defined as the amount of time it takes to handle normal network tasks like turning up a port, reassigning a VLAN or creating a new network\/subnet.\u00a0 While network latency is normally measured in milliseconds, the impact of human delays is typically measured in hours, days or weeks.<\/p>\n

The network has seen a paradigm shift.\u00a0 When networks were more static, IT teams could get away with higher human latency, but as the proliferation of devices explodes and the spike in virtualization continues, businesses are negatively impacted with human latency.\u00a0 When end users sit around waiting for a port to be activated or access to a VLAN, they can\u2019t do their job.<\/p>\n

Before, network engineers spent a lot of time and effort focusing on network latency, but didn\u2019t put a lot of emphasis on human delays.\u00a0 A perfect proof point is asking your network team to define their SLAs for network latency and they will typically say \u201cour provider guarantees latency no more than xx milliseconds.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then ask the SLA for normal changes and the answer is generally \u201cAs quickly as we can\u201d or \u201chopefully the same day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even for \u201csimple\u201d changes like activating a port or reassigning a VLAN, it normally comes through the help desk but typically requires a network engineer expert to make the change via CLI.\u00a0\u00a0 While the change itself should take less than 60 seconds to complete, the time grows to hours and days because of several factors:<\/p>\n