Virtually every enterprise network today includes some type of wide area network (WAN) technology - Frame Relay, X.25, dedicated line, or ATM - connecting distributed sites to a corporate backbone network. As data networks have evolved to become a mission-critical resource, increasing emphasis has been placed on managing WAN connectivity. A failing departmental server or LAN may affect a handful of users, but when a WAN link goes down, an entire remote site, perhaps even the entire enterprise, is affected. Early enterprise network management, largely performed using custom software, has now been replaced or complemented by commercial network management systems (NMS’s). First generation NMS’s monitored devices, interfaces, and protocols by collecting copious quantities of raw data to be filtered and analyzed by humans - network operations staff, capacity planning engineers, and highly-specialized technology gurus. Second generation NMS's increasingly rely upon element managers to automate a portion of this processing, but network management remains a labor-intensive and time-consuming task which often imposes substantial administrative traffic on the network being managed. Moreover, while commercial NMS's provide some view into network resources, black holes, opaque WAN "clouds", and lack of integration prevent these tools from correlating network failures end-to-end or determining their impact on the enterprise as a whole.

Enterprises are highly motivated to provide network operations staff with tools that enable effective, timely, and cost-effective WAN management, and tools that will ultimately help control the recurring costs of WAN bandwidth. Such are the business drivers which motivate enterprises to seek sophisticated tools capable of providing Service Level Management. An essential ingredient differentiating service level management from traditional network management is the ability to correlate network events with their impact on end-to-end service, allowing an enterprise to prioritize and assess the impact of faults and anticipated growth on the enterprise's ability to conduct business, generate revenue, and yield profit. The benefits of employing service level management include improved network operations efficiency, reduced down-time (and therefore cost) attributed to network failures, and more cost-effective network resource utilization and planning.

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