An IT department reports 99.8% server availability every month and the service level report is green, yet the business complains constantly that it cannot get its work done. What is this pattern usually called, and what does it indicate?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 7. Seven ITIL practices in detail medium
Draft — not checked yet. This question was written from the published exam objectives and cites the clause it comes from, but nobody has yet read it against that clause and signed for it.
It is kept out of search results and out of mock exams until they have. Read the source below before you take the answer as settled.
The options
Not correct A false positive from monitoring, which should be resolved by tightening the event correlation rules
Plausible-sounding but wrong. The measurement is not technically incorrect; the servers really were available. The problem is that the wrong thing was chosen as the measure of success.
Correct The watermelon effect: green on the outside, red on the inside, because the reported metric does not reflect the customer's actual experience
Correct. Reporting against a narrow technical metric can look healthy while the service, as the customer experiences it, is failing.
Not correct A breach of the underpinning contract by the infrastructure supplier
Nothing here indicates the supplier missed its commitments. The supplier is hitting the number it was given; the number is simply not a good proxy for the outcome.
Not correct Evidence that the availability target was set too low and should be raised to 99.99%
Raising a target that measures the wrong thing produces a greener watermelon, not a better service. The fix is a balanced bundle of outcome-based measures, not a stricter component figure.
Why
The watermelon SLA is the classic failure of single-metric reporting: the agreed measure is met, so the report is green, while the customer's experience is red. It is a measurement-design problem, not a monitoring fault, a supplier breach, or a threshold that is too generous — which is why the remedy is measures tied to business outcomes rather than a tighter component number.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 7
- What it says
- Reliance on a single operational metric can give a skewed view of service effectiveness — the 'watermelon' SLA, green outside and red inside.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 7 and space the ones you get wrong.