End-to-End Service Level Agreement Monitoring Framework

Abstract

The current trend in modeling and designing systems follows a new paradigm called Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) In this approach the functionality of the system is assigned to loosely coupled services where integration between heterogonous systems is possible. This situation highlights the necessity of conducting a contract which called Service Level Agreement (SLA). SLAs in SOA framework is still new, but recently it became imperative due to the high demand for services in SOA systems to be provided cross over organizations. SLAs are meaningless without monitoring the quality of the service which two parties or more agreed upon. Sometimes service provider, in turn, gets the service from other providers (supply chain) to deal with this situation, four End-to-End performance guarantee strategies have been proposed, Audit trail at each stage, the third-party do audit trail, End-to-End performance predicate, and cost versus performance trade-off. Also, the End-to-End monitor has been designed using the third party do audit trail strategy to monitor the performance and to perform audit trail in case of SLAs violation detected. Furthermore, Web Service Agreement Language (WSLA) is extended using UML profile to be more informative. Also, metric ontology has been developed to figure out semantic heterogeneity problem. End-to-End monitoring has a number of aspects such as SLAs in a supply chain are not public, Information exchange problem and End-to-End performance measuring problem. Proposed End-to-End SLAs monitoring framework resolves all these issues. Thus our proposed solution is distinct.