A state-space approach to SLA based management

Large complex systems (such as Enterprise systems) are often composed of several interacting, independent components. In many such systems, although the behavior of the constituent components is well characterized, the behavior that results from interaction between such components is more or less intractable; making it hard for the administrators to efficiently manage the system in conformance with the service level agreements or the SLAs. This paper presents an approach for deriving component-level objectives from system-level objectives or agreements, which if conformed to, imply conformance to the higher-level SLA. Our approach partitions the systempsilas state-space into homogeneous sub-spaces, creates micro-models for such subspaces, and then uses such micro-models to translate the higher-level objectives to component-level objectives. We have implemented a system, termed Pranaali, for evaluating our approach in realistic settings.