Automating SLA modeling

ABSTRACT

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) define the level of service that a service provider must deliver. An SLA is a contract between service provider and consumer, and includes appropriate actions to be taken upon violation of the contractual obligations. However, implementing an SLA using existing IT infrastructure is difficult, requiring a lot of manual effort to translate an SLA into code, model it with the given programming language, and ensure the required monitoring support is available for efficient monitoring and tracking of the SLAs.

In this paper, we present a solution for modeling an SLA contract. It is designed to be configurable, reusable, extensible and inheritable, thus providing great flexibility to construct complex SLAs. We also introduce an algorithmic generation pattern to create the necessary artifacts to implement an SLA presented in this paper. The resulting artifacts automatically monitor a business process and evaluate whether the SLA is violated during runtime execution. The proposed approach is designed to require minimal human intervention.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems
          Subjects: Distributed applications

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Web-based services

General Terms:
Design