Automated SLA performance analysis monitor with impact alerts on downstream jobs

A system and method for monitoring the performance of selected data processing jobs, comparing actual performance against the Service Level Agreement (SLA) to which each monitored job belongs, identifying discrepancies, and analyzing impacts to other jobs in a job stream. The present invention, also referred to as the Automated SLA Monitor (ASM), is a distributed computing platform comprising one or more Production Consoles for extracting job performance data from the production mainframe computers (or production midrange computers in other embodiments), one or more Production Servers for housing databases, one or more Maintenance Workstations for entering and maintaining SLA data, and one or more Client Workstations for presenting selected data to the user. When a job that is part of a SLA causes a delay, the ASM, by monitoring jobs of selected SLAs and production computer platforms, notifies the user of any problem with a selected SLA job, identifies the SLA critical path of which the job is part, along with all downstream dependent jobs, and determines the impact on the SLA of dependent jobs. The ASM reports these impacts to the user by automatically notifying the user if the SLA is in danger of not being met. The ASM also notifies the user of abnormal processing based upon actual performance of a job in previous executions by averaging prior run data and comparing the results to the current performance of a job to determine if the job is running faster or slower than normal.