• Intel® BMC System Debug Log Upload and Decryption – At the heart of SLA is the Intel® BMC System Debug Log (SDL). The full SDL is an encrypted file generated by the Intel® Baseboard Manageability Controller (BMC) that includes a wealth of information about the operation of your Intel® server. Once the file is generated by the users, SLA automates the process of upload, decryption, and analysis.

• Advanced System Debug Knowledge Base – Intel® makes server troubleshooting guides available to customers to enable self-help issue identification and resolution. Using those guides as a starting point, the SLA development team collaborated with customer support experts at Intel® to create an entirely new server debug knowledge base with over 3000 lines of additional content for use by SLA in identifying and resolving customer server issues.

• Server Issue Auto Correlation – Traditional troubleshooting guides and applications make it the responsibility of the user to correlate a system event with its associated troubleshooting content. A common use case is for the user to scour a log file looking for issues then manually cross-referencing those issues with their corresponding troubleshooting entries - a time-consuming and error prone process. SLA auto correlates, that is, it automatically scans log files looking for issues it then correlates with entries in its knowledge base in real-time. The user is presented with the results of that process rather than driving that process as is the case today.

• Automated Firmware Tracking – A common source of server maintenance issues is out of date system firmware. Running old BIOS, for example, may not only lead to server maintenance issues it can be the cause of performance or security related issues as well. Using the same API that powers the Intel® DSG Server Firmware Tracker, SLA automatically analyzes the system firmware configuration on the impacted server will recommend an updated version of that firmware when appropriate. Given the number of times out of date system firmware is the root cause of routine server maintenance issues, this feature alone can save customers hours of frustration.

• Decrypted System Debug Log File Download – While the SLA Dashboard UI alone may be sufficient for a user to identify and resolve a server support issue there are times when an advanced user will want to examine the SDL file for themselves. Today, the turnaround time for doing that is measured in days since it requires a customer support ticket to be opened as SDL file decryption cannot be performed outside of Intel®. SLA enables that use case in seconds by decrypting the SDL file on upload then giving the user the option to download the decrypted file directly from the application.

• Customer Centered Workflow – In the past parsing the full SDL was a time consuming process requiring users to open a support ticket with Intel®, manually transferring the file to Intel® for analysis, and working with an Intel® customer support engineer for even routine maintenance issues. Frankly, the process was Intel® centered, not customer centered. With SLA the customer is in control and can leverage Intel® custom support as much or as little as needed. Initiating a debug session, uploading and decrypting SDL files, utilizing the SLA issue management UI, and event downloading the decrypted SDL file all happen in real-time with the user in the driver's seat.

• Intel® Customer Support Connected – While SLA is optimized for user self-service routine server maintenance identification and debug, it also includes several features that facilitate a seamless transition to Intel®’s customer support services should SLA alone be insufficient for the task. Specifically, with user approval, SDL files uploaded to SLA will also be made available to Intel® customer representatives and their delegates should the user subsequently initiate a customer support ticket. This should significantly reduce time to resolution as much of the information needed by Intel® customer support will already be in the system.

• Industry Leading Server Debug Experience – No one understands Intel® technology better than Intel®. The SLA development team tapped into a pool of Intel® subject matter experts with hundreds of person-years of server system debug experience to construct the knowledge base that underpins the application. Users benefit from that unparalleled industry experience seamlessly through features like server issue auto correlation. That same development team and those same subject matter experts are already hard at work on expanding SLA's scope of coverage to further enhance the benefit.

• Seamless Servertools Integration – SLA is the latest addition to Intel® DSG's Servertools portfolio of online applications and services. As a practical matter that means user benefit from cross-pollination with applications like the Servertools Firmware Tracker which provides SLA users with guidance on the latest firmware available for their servers. Further, SLA takes advantage of a common Servertools "look and feel" design thereby lowering the learning curve across the entire portfolio. Lastly, like all Servertools applications SLA is hosted on Intel® cloud infrastructure and supported by a dedicated team of developers and devops professionals.